kernel Panic, please i need some help

[goodnik]

well, hi everybody.
i have an ibm laptop computer, runing with winxp on hda1, and debian testing on hda2, wich i recently make some upgrades, after that, i reboot my computer and now i get this kernel panic message:

kernel Panic - not syncing :VFS : unable to mount root fs or unknown-block (0,0)

i've googled for a while, but all i found was some suggestions about checking the grub menu.lst, but theres no problem with it.
some says that the problem could be a worg compilation of the kernel, but since im a newbie, i didnt mess with the kernel yet.
so please, i need some help, as i said im a new to linux.... i can't even start on recovery mode....

somthing curious that i've found is that when i've traied to read (using live cd) my /boot/initrc-2.6.15-1-486 with nano, all i could see where just symbols,and with gedit i get error message:

gedit was not able to automatically detect the character coding. Please, check that you are not trying to open a binary file and try again selecting a character coding in the 'Open File...' (or 'Open Location') dialog.

is this normal??? can this be my problem???
thanks.
(sorry about my english...)

[antidrugue]

somthing curious that i've found is that when i've traied to read (using live cd) my /boot/initrc-2.6.15-1-486 with nano, all i could see where just symbols,

Yop, perfectly normal. nano doesn't handle well a binary file of about 5 Mb.

The problem may be many things.

Are you 100% sure that grub is pointing to the right root partition?

[goodnik]

...
Are you 100% sure that grub is pointing to the right root partition?

well, i am, it points to my hda2 partition.

title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.15-1-486
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-1-486 root=/dev/hda2 ro quiet splash vga=791
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.15-1-486
savedefault
boot

thanks a lot anyway.