VFS: Cant open root device hda7 or unknown-block(0,0)

[Maverick82]

Hi i'm almost home with my gentoo install and have come to the bootloader... unfortunately (though not unsurprisingly) it failed It went through the detection of my other drvies like my cdrom etc.... but then it stalls on the following error :

VFS: can not open root device or unknown block (0,0)

I have double checked to make sure the config file is pointing to the right locations my fdisk is as follows:


Disk /dev/hda: 200.0 GB, 200049647616 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 24321 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 1324 10634998+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2 1325 7698 51199155 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda3 7699 24321 133524247+ 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 7699 7711 104391 83 Linux
/dev/hda6 7712 7774 506016 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda7 7775 8383 4891761 83 Linux


hda5 is my /boot
hda7 is my /

my grub conf file is as follows

# Which listing to boot as default. 0 is the first, 1 the second etc.
default 1
# How many seconds to wait before the default listing is booted.
timeout 30
# Nice, fat splash-image to spice things up
# Comment out if you don't have a graphics card installed
splashimage=(hd0,4)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz

title=Gentoo Linux 2.6.16-r13
# Partition where the kernel image (or operating system) is located
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/kernel-2.6.16-gentoo-r13 root=/dev/hda5

# The next four lines are only if you dualboot with a Windows system.
# In this case, Windows is hosted on /dev/hda6.
title=Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1



what am i doing wrong or have i compiled a kernel that doesnt support ext3 or something silly?

I'm sooooo close , please help!

[d38dm8nw81k1ng]

i think you need to change:

kernel /boot/kernel-2.6.16-gentoo-r13 root=/dev/hda5

to

kernel /boot/kernel-2.6.16-gentoo-r13 root=/dev/hda7

note that root is now /dev/hda7 instead of /dev/hda5

[Maverick82]

I tried to edit the code from hda5 to hda7 using the "e" command during boot, the system stalls at exactly the same point but now complains about not being able to open root device "hda7" or unknown-block (0,0)

will the setup of my fstab effect this? i thought i did what was instructed

[d38dm8nw81k1ng]

double check your kernel configuration. make sure your kernel supports BLK_DEV_IDE and stuff like that. use

less /usr/src/linux/.config

and search for the chipset of your motherboard, using /
so, for example, if your motherboard uses a VIA chipset (as mine does), you'd enter /VIA and search through all examples of it and enable anything that's relevant.

another problem may be how your drives are labelled. my sata drive was labelled as /dev/hde instead of /dev/sda, which threw me. however, this is very unlikely.