HD Install :: kernel panic with hd install

Hi all,
I’m getting a kernel panic signal on boot from a hd. The error is “VFS: cannot open root device ‘812’ or 08:12”…”kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 08:12”

Situation: I have an old dell laptop with no floppy, and a bios that will not allow boot from cd. So:

1) Took the hd out then mounted it on another machine with a little usb adapter. Did the partitioning as recommended (i.e., swap on sda1 and root on sda2 –ext2).
2) Then booted the machine with the dsl disk and did a hd install to /dev/sda2. I have tried both the standard and expert install, and get the same error.
3) Went with the lilo option in the dialog.
4) Then put the little hd back into the laptop and rebooted, and get the error above.

Could someone offer a suggestion; other than give-up. The error also suggests appending a correct “boot=” option. But I don’t know what that option would be.

Thanks for your help, from what I have seen, this is a great product!

-andy

I got exactly the same problem.

I never resolved this issue. I went to miniknoppix and all was well.

I figured out what the problem was, I was booting from a SCSI hard drive (in Vmware) and you can't do that cause the kernel doesn't have scsi support. So I changed to IDE (within Vmware) reinstalled everything and voilá. Everything is working now.

excellent! Ill give it a try. thanks -andy

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