FC3: kernel panic on first boot

[John Swartzentruber]

On 12/2/2004 9:50 AM Robin Bowes wrote:

> John Swartzentruber wrote:
>
>>>
>> Look through the archives.
>
>
> I have - I can't find anything relevant. The archive search facility 
> at redhat.com doesn't seem to return any useful results.

You can search this newsgroup at http://search.gmane.org/, either search 
for your problem or search for my address to get my initial message 
about this problem.

>
>
>> I fixed it by building a new initrd file that included the driver for 
>> my SATA controller.
>
>
> Can you point me at any docs that guide me through this process?

Not really. I'm a real newbie at all this stuff. I just did extensive 
googling. Look at the man page for mkinitrd. Google for it as well. I 
found some stuff when I googled for mkinitrd and sata_sil (although it 
turns out I really wanted sata_via). You should be able to boot from 
your Rescue CD. When you do, it should flash up a window when it loads 
your SATA driver. Notice which drive it is loading because that is the 
one you need.

I created a new image using mkinitrd (i.e., did *not* overwrite the one 
that was there). I created a new entry in my grub.conf and used the new 
image.

> I also noticed that my modprobe.conf file was missing things after 
> upgrading, which might have been the original problem.
>
> Such as? What should modprobe.conf look like? Mine just contains one 
> line:
>
> # Note: for use under 2.4, changes must also be made to modules.conf!
> alias char-major-89-* i2c-dev
>
> However, there is a modprobe.conf.dist file which has 165 lines. 
> Should I copy this to modprobe.conf?

I don't know. I think I compared it with modprobe.conf.anacbak, which I 
assume was my previous file. There is a possibility that this relates to 
a different problem.