I have tried booting into 3 different installations of gentoo linux in the past few weeks, and each of them gives me the same error: Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03: 04 I cannot believe it to be anything other than a Gentoo bug for the following reasons: 1)The first time I tried to install gentoo on my machine I didnt complete the configuration properly after extracting the stage 3 image from the cd, but I believe it should have worked regardless. 2)I then built gentoo from source, from a stage 1 install, this time with xfs instead of reiserfs, and I had the same problem, I thought it might be the fs I was using and I missed something, so... 3) I built another stage 3 install on reiserfs and used the same .config file and same kernel sources and completed a proper stage 3 linux, and when I tried booting into it, I got the same error. Then... 4) I took the same .config file and kernel sources and built and installed the kernel for my Mandrake partition and booted using that same kernel successfully. I believe many others have had the same problem I am having based on the forums I have read etc. If anyone can help me based on what I describe here, I would appreciate it. One other thing worth noting about my install of the last 2 gentoo systems is that I installed them in a chrooted environment from mandrake because of the fact that pppoe install is not supported on gentoo and I needed a network connection to complete the install. However, all other instructions were followed correctly.
in your fstab file on your gentoo box, did you try changing the root file partition from 3 to 2? just a though... does this link help?: http://www.redhat.com/mailing-lists/cartman-list/msg00447.html
see comments in bug. It's very likely that you didn't enable the right kernel options to allow your root filesystem to be mounted.
You know...I believe I have an understanding of why these partitions wont boot, but I am kind of new with these matters and would appreciate advice on how I should configure the system. I believe it has to do with my fstab file on my gentoo install, but I tried doing the right configuration for my set up and I think I did it wrong...my situation is this: win2000 on /dev/hda1 and /dev/hda2 gentoo stage 3 install on /dev/hda3 gentoo stage 1 install on /dev/hda4 mandrake on /dev/hda5 swap on /dev/hda6 I use lilo as my boot manager and am quite sure I have it set up correctly (lilo is used by mandrake and I dont wish to overwrite it with grub) My fstab file is where I think I screwed up, I didnt make a boot partition for gentoo, so I didnt think I needed a boot partition entry in fstab. Here is what my fstab file looks like: /dev/hda4 / xfs noatime 0 0 /dev/hda6 none swap noatime 0 0 /dev/cdroms/cdrom0 /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,ro 0 0 /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto defaults 0 0 proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0 Maybe I was dumb and should have followed the instructions as far as creating a boot partition but I put several days and a lot of compile time into what I currently have and I dont want to start over again. Can you suggest to me a way to get what I already have working? I would appreciate it. Jeff
