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

[Kyle Rankin]

On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 12:24:54PM -0800, Robert Hayes wrote:
> 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)
> 

It really sounds like the DSL disk install did interfere with the grub
install on your hard drive. If your SD card is still inserted, remove it,
boot off a rescue disk, chroot into your root partition and run a
grub-install to reload everything. 

-- 
Kyle Rankin
NBLUG President
The North Bay Linux Users' Group
http://nblug.org
IRC: greenfly at irc.freenode.net #nblug 
kyle at nblug.org