Kernel panic and screen corruption on boot [solved]

[durian]

I have a little server when I rebooted yesterday, but something went terribly wrong.

The boot process goes allright, GRUB starts, and immediately after, the screen garbles (see: http://durian.se/DSC_2343a.jpg). I think the last lines read "kernel panic".

Anyway, I booted with a SystemRescue disk, and that works fine. I did fsck on all the disks after booting with that, and that gives me no errors.

What can have happened? The machine had not been rebooted for about four months, but had received (some) updates.

-peter

[Letharion]

I think the error message is "Kernel panic, not syncing VFS, unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(1,0)"
Can you try to make out the line above? I looks like something about having tried to mount root?

Have you done the usual checks? Filesystem and chipset drivers are IN the kernel, and not modules. Do you have a correct root= in grub?

Is this your config, or genkernel?

I have had similar problems with the screen output, they have worked themselves out during the init-stage. That makes me guess that the problem is related to what graphics drivers are included in the kernel. Just a guess though.

[durian]

By the way, I just noticed that I don't even get the grub menu which shows the kernels installed, and gives a five or ten seconds pause before it continues. The screen goes wrong directly. Maybe I should chroot the old root partition and reinstall grub?

I checked the filesystems after I booted with SystemRescue, they seemed to be ok.

The config is genkernel. Could be some driver/module problem, or the initrd image (?).

How to fix it is the big question :-)

-peter

[Letharion]

[durian]

[Letharion]

[durian]