Hi,

I am having COMPAQ 510 laptop which had fedora 11 installed & it was working fine. I upgraded fedora 11 to fedora 13. In upgrade process, downloading of all packages was completed. After the reboot it installed all packages & promoted me message similar to "Please wait This might take a while". I waited about 5 to 10 minutes & suddenly there was shut down as battery went low.

Now when I start the laptop it shows me message as "Kernal Panic - Not syncing: VFS : unable to mount root fs on unknown - block (0,0)".

It does not allow me to any thing further / laptop hang's-up at this point.

I am new to fedora / linux environment. I know that I did mistake of upgrade without taking backup of critical data.

But still ...

I want to get the system in place "as is" without loosing any data. Is there any way like using a live CD & few commands that will help to restore system / upgrade system & move on.

I tried booting system / laptop by holding down shift key, it took me to GRUB.

It displayed screen as,

GNU GRUB 0.97 with two options,

- Fedora 2.6.34.7-56fc13.i686
- Upgrade to Fedora 13 (Goddard).

On selection of first option "Fedora 2.6.34.7-56fc13.i686", it displays me error message "Kernal Panic - Not syncing: VFS...." and system comes to hault.

On selection of second option "Upgrade to Fedora 13 (Goddard)", it takes me to a screen provides me option to select image to upgrade.

Screen contains a form with message "What partition & directory on partition holds the installation image fedora? If you don't see the disk drive using listed below, press F2 to configure addition devices".

There is text box which allows me specify the path.

There are four installation methods provided as,
a) Local / CD / DVD
b) Hard Drive
c) NFS DIR
d) URL


Using LIVE CD, I saw that there is new partition which did not exists previously. It is under root/media/21d3d62b-e8b5-463e-b6de7e4512/
with directories as "GRUB", "Upgrade", etc.
Under "upgrade" directory it has three to four files,
a) initrd.img
b) ks.cfg
c) vmlinuz

There is also directory with name "New", which contains rhinstall-imstall.img file.

My queries are,
a) Is Grub still functioning to restore / upgrade?
b) How should I specify path of image directory & what will be path? (Is there any to find it out)
c) Any other method which will help out?

My laptop is compaq 510 having configuration as

Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T5870,2.0 GHz, 2 MB L2 Cache, 800 MHz FSB with 160 GB of hard drive.

Please Help!

Thanks in Advance,
Amit