From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S264834AbUD1Pnj (ORCPT ); Wed, 28 Apr 2004 11:43:39 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S264840AbUD1Pnj (ORCPT ); Wed, 28 Apr 2004 11:43:39 -0400 Received: from mail.skule.net ([216.235.14.165]:34730 "EHLO mail.skule.net") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S264834AbUD1Pnh (ORCPT ); Wed, 28 Apr 2004 11:43:37 -0400 Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2004 11:43:37 -0400 From: Mark Frazer To: Linux Kernel List Subject: root cause of VFS: Cannot open root device "LABEL=/" or unknown-block(0,0) Message-ID: <20040428154337.GC26897@mjfrazer.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline X-Message-Flag: Outlook not so good. Organization: Detectable, well, not really X-Bender: Want me to smack the corpse around a little? User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.5.1+cvs20040105i Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org 'make install' on the Fedora systems will set grub up to use an initrd. If you do this with a Linus 2.6 kernel, you will often see this error when trying to use the initrd: VFS: Cannot open root device "LABEL=/" or unknown-block(0,0) Please append a correct "root=" boot option Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0) The most common advice given is to change your grub entry to something like root=/dev/hda2. What most of the other posts on this topic don't include is the preceeding messages: kernel: checking if image is initramfs...it isn't (no cpio magic); looks like an initrd kernel: Freeing initrd memory: 98k freed kernel: RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0 kernel: RAMDISK: incomplete write (-28 != 32768) 4194304 The root of the problem is that the default ramdisk size of 4096 is not big enough for the initrd used on Fedora. I presume the same problem exists on other systems. Perhaps the default ramdisk size (CONFIG_BLK_DEV_RAM_SIZE) on the linus kernels could be increased to 8192. cheers -mark -- Drugs are for losers. And hypnosis is for losers with big weird eyebrows. - Fry