I'm not a newbie per se, as I've been using Linux exclusively for over a year and have experience with various other *NIXes. However I've lead a charmed life and things have always "just worked" for me in the past. This is my first kernel panic and I'm stymied.
My memory is poor, but I'll attempt to recall some installation details:
Dell 3-ish gig
512MB ram
two 160gig SATA harddrives:
sda: XP, Dell recovery partition
sdb: SuSE Linux 9.2 Professional
All was chugging along nicely until I moved to a new apartment. Upon firing up the machine to SuSE, I get a kernel panic. Booting to XP works fine, unfortunately. To the best of my knowledge I had not changed anything important prior to booting down before the move. All cables have been checked and are well-seated where they should be.
I have manually transcribed here as much of the boot.msg as I can see on the screen. Please pardon any typos ("sbd" for "sdb", for instance).
Code:
Vendor: ATA Model: WDC WD1600JD-75H Rev: 08.0
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 05
SCSI device sda: 312500000 512-byte hdwr sectors (160000 MB)
SCSI devive sda: drive cache: write back
sda: sda1 sda2 sda3
Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
Vendor: ATA Model: Maxtor ^Y160M0 Rev: YAR5
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 05
SCSI device sdb: 320173056 512-byte hdwr sectors (163929 MB)
SCSI device sbd: drive cache: write back
sbd: sbd1 sbd2
Attached scsi disk sbd at scsi0, channel 0, id 1 lun 0
Loading kernel/fs/reiserfs/reiserfs.ko
Waiting for device /dev/sbd2 to appear: . ok
rootfs: major=8 minor=18 devn=2066
ReiserFS: sdb2: found reiserfs format "3.6" with standard journal
ata1: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
ata1: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }
ata1: status=0x51 { DriveRead SeekComplete Error }
ata1: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }
ata1: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
ata1: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }
ata1: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
ata1: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }
scsi0: ERROR on channel0, id1, lun 0, CBD: Read (10) 00 03 47 9f 41 00 00 08 00
Current sbd: sense key Medium Error
Additional sense: Unrecovered read error - auto reallocate failed
end_request: I/O error, dev sbd, sector 55025473
ata1: status=0x51 { DriveReadySeekComplete Error }
ata1: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }
Current ...
...
ata1: error ... (five times)
ReiserFS: sbd2: warning: sh-2029: reiserfs read_bitmaps: bitmap block (#6619136) reading failed
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(8,18)
I am able to access the Rescue system on the SuSE 9.2 installation discs, but I must admit that I don't know what to do with it. My suspicion about what's going on here is that despite the fact that it seems like it's trying to boot from sdb2, the boot info is actually contained on sda1. That's only a suspicion. How can I check this?
Many thanks in advance for any assistance the community can give.
--V