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Re: [LUG] Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(3,8)

 

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Simon Waters wrote:

>It is hard to suggest, as you haven't described how you broke it. I
>appreciate you may not know.

Hi Simon,

As my first mail said I was setting up some Samba shares.  I'll give
you as much detail as I can on how I was doing that:

Installed webmin 1.240 from Xandros Networks to both laptop and desktop.
Upgraded both to 1.260 from www.webmin.com within webmin itself.
Shared the relevant drives on the desktop as Windows (ie Samba)
shares.  Reasons are;
a) it will work with my Dad's laptop that only has Windows
b) I had grief last time I tried using NFS as it wanted static IPs and
(for soem reason) my network threw a wobbly.
So basically I'm using what I know works.
Using webmin I setup the network drives on the laptop to point to the
desktop shares.

That all worked fine.  I was able to see the desktop shares and
send/receive files to them.

That's when the trouble started.

Next step - share the laptop partitions.  As they are Windows (FAT32)
it made sense to me to call the shares the same name as the partitions
in Windows.  Problem was I couldn't remember them.  Easy fix, reboot
into Windows and see what they are.

Problem - Windows has a nasty habit on the laptop of booting with no
touchpad or keyboard access.  Probably a USB issue, I don't know.
Anyway it did it, so I had to power off the laptop to reboot it
*again*.  I've done it many times before with no problem whatsoever.
When I press the power button I get "Windows is shutting down" so I
can't see that any harm is being done (although obviously it would be
*nice* if Windows would behave itself properly!)

After a couple of tries I booted back into Linux on the laptop.

That's when I got the error in the subject, and I have been unable to
boot Linux on the laptop since.

Presumably Windows forcing me to shut the PC off corrupted something
in Linux.  God knows how or what it could have done, hence the cry for
help.

>
>The error is typical of not having the appropriate drivers (or settings)
>to mount the root file system.
>
>I'd expect this if.....
>
>1) You upgraded (changed) the kernel, but didn't run lilo afterwards
>(GRUB doesn't require this rerunning and should really replace lilo for
>most people).

Not done anything to the kernel - stock for Xandros 3.0

>
>Fix for this, is boot from recovery media, mount hard disk, chroot to
>mount, and run the omitted "lilo" command, and then reboot from the
>harddisk.

How would you suggest using recovery media given that the laptop
doesn't have a floppy disk?  Would a USB stick work (assuming i can
boot via USB in the BIOS).

>
>2) Something bad happened to the disk partitions (such as might happen
>if you installed an OS over the top of the disk space Linux was using.

Nothing of that nature AFAIK, certainly nothing I've done myself.

>
>3) You broke /etc/fstab.

Possible if that's what got corrupted.  Again though no clue how it
could have happened.

>Brings us back to the discussion on use of root in another thread.

Very true.

Kind regards,

Julian
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