Failed to Boot "Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS:"

zenwalker20 · n00b Joined: 17 Dec 2012 Posts: 3

Hello everyone!

I have decided to give gentoo a try! I have followed the handbook for an AMD64 build. I received no errors during the install process, even went and edited a few options during the install but nothing to crazy. I chose to compile my own kernel vs the genkernel and I went with ext4 instead of ext3.

Anywho, on to my question.

I thought the install was going swimmingly until, i got to the part requiring I reboot my system after configuring grub. Upon reboot i am greeted with a friendly grub screen asking me to pick what i want to boot. I choose gentoo. and i loads a for a few seconds and everything stops. There is some error messages but i am unable to page up or down on the console to see what happened but this is what I can see.

VFS: Cannot open root device "sda3" or unknown-block(0,0): error
Please append a correct "root=" boot option; here are the available partitions:
Kernel Panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)
Pid: 1, comm: swapper/0 Not tainted 3.5.7-gentoo #1
Call Trace: (lots of numbers I don't think are very helpful)

Any hope on recovering this? I really would hate to erase and try again, I hope its something simple not really sure where to look to fix this. Oh, i installed from the minimal live cd.

Thanks!

BillWho · Veteran Joined: 03 Mar 2012 Posts: 1600 Location: US

zenwalker20,

Try appending rootfstype=ext3 to your grub kernel line.
_________________
Good luck :wink:

Since installing gentoo, my life has become one long emerge

cach0rr0 · Posted: Mon Dec 17, 2012 5:59 am Post subject:

casualx · n00b Joined: 06 Feb 2012 Posts: 58 Location: switzerland

I hope you dont get scared from this happened to your install...when I was install first the same happened to me too!
I think too that its the missing kernel driver for the hdd controller.
have a lot of fun with gentoo in the further!

Crooksey · Posted: Mon Dec 17, 2012 12:45 pm Post subject:

Here is a cool trick when installing Gentoo.

Run lspci -kk on your install media, you get a list of all hardware and the name of the kernel driver its using.

Now when you run make menuconfig type "/" in to bring a search prompt, then type the driver name.

It tells you its location in the kernel and whether you currently have it installed/enabled.

Good luck

zenwalker20 · n00b Joined: 17 Dec 2012 Posts: 3

Thanks for all the help!

I got it working, here is what I did.

I booted the live cd, and went through all the steps in the handbook to mount my system and chroot in the system. I ran menuconfig and enabled every single non-experimental sata/pata driver i could find

I recompiled the kernel copied it over /boot and tweaked grub to reflect the new kernel.

I am now greeted to a friendly login screen after boot, upon which i logged into root. which worked swimmingly.

I have one last question, before i go emerging crazy. It is related to USE flags. I enabled a bunch of use flags during install so I wouldn't have to worry about it later to much. are these use flags okay? I am hoping to make a gnome3 system.

USE=" bindist mmx sse sse2 gtk gnome -kde -qt4 cdr alsa X a52 aac aim apm branding bzip2 cdda cddb cdparanoia css dbus dga dvd dvdr encode exif ffmpeg flac ftp gif gnome-keyring gstreamer gtkhtml jpeg java joystick lame mad mozilla msn networkmanager offensive opengl pulseaudio videos vorbis wavpack wifi win32codecs x264 yahoo oscar"

Is that to many? Am I missing anything i might want to include. I did select the gnomesystem profile as well.

Thanks again for all the help, I am new to source distro's. I am learning so much!

-Zenwalker20

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Mon Dec 17, 2012 8:10 pm Post subject:

zenwalker20,

Don't pay too much attention to kernel features marked 'experimenial'. Some of them have been that way since 1999, when I started with Linux.

You should choose the /gnome profile with

zenwalker20 · n00b Joined: 17 Dec 2012 Posts: 3

I looked into what you said with the emerge gnome command.

i know P stands for pretend and it has been useful. I deleted all those use flags and the packages pulled went down dramatically. It went from a 480 mb of packages downloaded to 135. If i delete the use flags will i loose functionality? I need to configure my wifi card, but that can wait till i have a gui, it will be much easier. Also, i tried to emerge gnome and it will not due to an error

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Tue Dec 18, 2012 12:56 am Post subject:

zenwalker20,

USE flags control optional functionality. If you turn them off, that optional functionality will not be installed.

Configuring your WiFi with a GUI is actually harder than using the console. Most GUIs in Linux are just pretty front ends to the command line tools for doing the same job.
If a GUI works first time, OK, it might be easier for users not yet at home in the shell. If not, you will be using the shell to debug and fix it.

To break circular dependencies, it is necassary to build some things twice, once with the dependency broken then again with it in place.
You can put the temporary USE change into make.conf if you want, or because its only temporary, you may give it on the command line like