Date added: Tuesday, July 6 2004, 07:41AM
All sorts of trouble.
Well, I've not posted for a while, and there's a reason behind it.
Roughly a week ago, I compiled the 2.6.7 kernel (straight from kernel.org), without any problems.
Now, I have a new monitor, and wanted to reconfigure X11 to adjust to my new monitor, and install the latest NVidia driver that was released a few days ago.
So, I configured X okay, and was installing the NVidia driver, when it halted on an error, saying I needed to switch off 'rivafb' in my kernel, thus having to recompile the kernel.
After the kernel (and modules) compiled, I placed the files (bzImage and System.map) in /boot, as I always do, and rebooted.
Now here is where it started happening.
Once booting into 2.6.7, it gave me an error saying "Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs /dev/hda3
".
Though, I know hda3 is my root filesystem.
So I rebooted again, and luckily I still had my 2.6.6 kernel, so I booted into that.
The first thing I did was check my kernel settings, which were all okay in my eyes.
To be safe, I deleted the .config file, and grabbed my backed up copy of my 2.6.6 .config file.
I did a 'make mrproper', copied the backup .config file, 'make oldconfig' to set up the "new" features, 'make menuconfig' to check to be certain (and re-removed the 'rivafb'. — hey, I'm not that stupid, heh), then compiled the kernel and modules, and installed the lot.
Rebooted again, and, the same problem.
After doing the same for a few hundred time, I got so sick of it, that I re-downloaded the 2.6.7 kernel completely, and set that one up manually.
But STILL the same damn error occurd.
I got so frustrated, I made a post on the Gentoo forums (first time I've ever seeked help on a forum, mind you).
That didn't help.
So I decided to post my problem on a newsgroup (alt.os.linux.gentoo), which kind of helped, but not really.
In the end (yesterday), I found my answer.
It seems that I needed to switch on "CONFIG_MSDOS_PARTITION
" in the kernel.
Which is weird, because in my 2.6.6 kernel, I did not set it myself, in fact, I don't remember setting it at all.
Either way, it's fixed now, and I set up X11 accordingly, and installed the latest NVidia driver.
On top of that, I tweaked my kernel so heavily, it's now 1.6MB, instead of the previous 2.2MB.
And, I'm now using the "CONFIG_4KSTACKS
" option in the kernel, just because now I can.