[NBLUG/talk] Kernel Panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block (0, 0)

[Robert Hayes]

Greetings, all, 

I have (had) an installation of Debian Etch working beautifully and reliably 
on my older laptop (AMD 475Mhz, 4GB hd, 180MB RAM) running Elightenment16 and 
Opera + some Gnome. So well in fact that it prompted me to invest in maxing 
out the memory for the laptop to the limit: 180MB. (It cost me $12 including 
shipping.)

Then I wanted to try loading a distro from a USB thumb drive, and chose 
DamnSmallLinux. I booted from the live DSL CD, and chose USB drive install to 
a new 4GB microSD thumb drive ($6 including shipping from China!).

When I went to reboot the system from the hard drive (Etch) I received the 
following messages and the system hangs. The grub device maps seem unchanged, 
the rest of the grub.conf is the same as before the DSL install.

I've googled this error code and stopped reading after about 30+ different 
problems that result in this error code but are completely unrelated to this 
experience. It seems to be a fairly common error response.

Any ideas or leads?

I don't think the first few lines are relevant to the problem but included 
them just in case. 

TIA,

Robert

-----

RAMDISK: incomplete write (-28 !=32768) 8388608

RAMDISK: ran out of compressed data 

invalid compressed format (err=1)

VFS: Cannot open root device "hda1" or unknown-block )0,0)

Please append a correct "root=" boot option

Kernel Panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block 
(0,0)