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No matter how I try to get at it, Default, Failsafe, and all the other Linux boot menu options under SuSE I get this error: "Kernel Panic VFS Unable to mount root fs on 03:43" I can live without the old contents of the HDD if it is necessary. to format the thing. dmc Have you tried booting from the installation CD/DVD and choosing the 'repair' option?? It bailed me out a time or two... HTH...

Tried all of the suggestions, the thing isn't interested in booting via rescue disks (linux SuSE9, RH9, KRUD, or Win98), nor does it want to allow me to do a new SuSE 9 Pro install ... to that request I get a bright red box: "An error occurred during installation". Guess I will boot with the Win98 disk and do a "format/s c:" and then run a fresh install of SuSE 9 Pro. This is my morning project ... unless someone has a better suggestion. Thanks! dmc

Dr. David M. Colburn wrote:

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No matter how I try to get at it, Default, Failsafe, and all the other Linux boot menu options under SuSE I get this error: "Kernel Panic VFS Unable to mount root fs on 03:43" I can live without the old contents of the HDD if it is necessary. to format the thing. dmc

Have you tried booting from the installation CD/DVD and choosing the 'repair' option?? It bailed me out a time or two... HTH...

Tried all of the suggestions, the thing isn't interested in booting via rescue disks (linux SuSE9, RH9, KRUD, or Win98), nor does it want to allow me to do a new SuSE 9 Pro install ... to that request I get a bright red box: "An error occurred during installation".

Guess I will boot with the Win98 disk and do a "format/s c:" and then run a fresh install of SuSE 9 Pro.

This is my morning project ... unless someone has a better suggestion.

Thanks! dmc

Intriguing! By rescue disks, I guess you mean floppies, in which case you may have a faulty floppy. I would not expect a CD/DVD to fail, unless you have a hardware problem. If possible, you could try moving the disk back to the previous box to verify it's OK. Sounds like a HARDWARE problem as I've moved disks around many times without problems. On the occasions when moving from an Intel to an Athlon, I had to boot from timos rescuecd, mount the / partition as /mnt, then "chroot /mnt", build an Athlon kernel, mkinitrd, grub-install /dev/hda and rebooted. Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce .... Hamradio G3VBV and keen Flyer Linux Only Shop.

The plot thickens ... I reformatted from DOS ... sorry, but nothing else was working. Had to do it twice because I forgot to fdisk and get rid of the Linux partitions. Booted from the SuSE 9 Pro CD 1 and started a new Installation in Safe Mode. Now I have a lovely new error message, much more creative than the old one: "Kernel panic: Aiee, killing interrupt handler! In interrupt handler -- not syncing." Gobbledygook to me ... can someone translate, please? I just need SuSE 9 Pro to wipe everything on the HDD and to repartition and install cleanly. Do I have to go out and buy partitioning software or is there a command line I can get to and a command I can issue in order to force my way past whatever is messing with the kernel in the installation process? Thanks! dmc

Hartmut Meyer wrote:

This could be a pointer to a hardware flaw (most likely defective RAM). You're not doing any overclocking or the like? My advise would be to let metest86 ("memory test" boot option from the 1st SUSE CD) run over night and see if it reports any errors.

Hmmm. I did start the memory test but after an hour and no errors I figured it was testing minutae that was improbable as the source of the trouble ... run it overnight? Wow! OK. I can also check the motherboard settings, perhaps something could be amiss there. Thanks! dmc

Hartmut Meyer wrote:

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This could be a pointer to a hardware flaw (most likely defective RAM). You're not doing any overclocking or the like? My advise would be to let metest86 ("memory test" boot option from the 1st SUSE CD) run over night and see if it reports any errors. Letting it run overnight is the minimum (unless you see errors befor). And even if no errors are reported after many hours, that would be no proof of absence of hardware problems (unfortunately). memtest86 does not find all RAM defects (but most).

OK, 25:47:49 hours of memory testing later with no errors I think I will consider this a "thorough-enough" test. Next I will move on to your other suggestions later in the week when I find some "free" time! Thanks! dmc

wmeler wrote: I'd suggest running mkinitrd and "grub-install /dev/hda", after booting from CD/DVD and doing a repair if booting an already installed > system doesn't work. I'm sure there is a way around this. Some months > ago I had to move my HD from an Athlon 2200+ machine with hardware problems to an Athlon 900 box and didn't experience any problems. I would advise not being to hasty to reformat, I've done this many times > over the years, even moving the disk to boxes with different hardware. Regards Sid.

I cannot get that far, it either kernel fails or install errors. John Andersen wrote:

Ok, you didn't say what the heck an A7V8X-X was, so I had to go look it up, and found out its not for intel, but rather for athlon. So now I got to ask, was the "ormatted and loaded HDD" formerly in an intel box as the root drive (containing a kernel meant for intel)???

Went from K6 to Athlon, with the old kernel in place. Should run OK, if not optimized. I have another HDD that was set up on a Duron running on a k6 box and it is crawling ... since it is s temporary setup until this Athlon box is ready we are living with it.

... formatting the disk and restarting from scratch will not be necessary. You say that the install systems bails out on you with an error. Have you tried the "save settings" option.

Never get that far. The data on the HDD isn't worth the time and trouble for all of the debugging tracing ... a fresh format seems most efficient. I will be saving this thread to my SuSE printed file for future reference. Thanks for all of the suggestions! Great list! dmc

Dylan wrote:

On Saturday 28 February 2004 00:44 am, Dr. David M. Colburn wrote:

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I moved a SuSE 9 Pro formatted and loaded HDD to a newly assembled PC. ASUS A7V8X-X Rev 1.xx w/256m RAM, etc. No matter how I try to get at it, Default, Failsafe, and all the other Linux boot menu options under SuSE I get this error: "Kernel Panic VFS Unable to mount root fs on 03:43"

OK, 03:43 refers to what?

You'd have to ask whoever coded the error message script, I have no idea.

I've had two issues with drives which I swapped from one box to another. The first came down to the bios settings - One machine was using the real physical cylinder/head/sector values, and the other was using a logical remapping. I'd assumed that would be irelevant for Linux (it not using the bios settings for hd identifacion etc... and it being a purely data drive) but although the partition was mountable it was the wrong size and the directory listings were garbage. Until I managed to force the bios to accept the correct settings. I figure the remapping was going on at a level where Linux couldn't bypass it.

That is odd, perhaps it has been resolved in the latest versions?

The second was a drive which had to have different jumper settings - it has a setting for solo device on the IDE channel and a different one for MASTER with slave.

That is always a first-check item as I have seen inconsistencies from hdd to hdd caused by jumper preferences.

Yeh, I know - it's probably not relevant and I'm rambling... I'll shut up now. You could try using something like toms boot disk to extract the data first. Dylan

Thanks for sharing and trying to help, I just have to get this thing resolved so I can get the ancient K6 off my desk and this Athlon 2500 Barton-based box in its place ... waiting for things on the old K6 is killing me! ;-) dmc