Kernel panic on first boot in fedora 3

[John Swartzentruber]

On 11/16/2004 5:03 PM Alexandre Van Haecke wrote:

>Hi all,
>I've just downloaded and installed Fedora 3 x86_64 on an nforce 3 board
>with an Athlon 64 socket 939 and a SATA disk (important detail)
>As far as I could tell installation went well but upon reboot I got the
>fatal message when selecting fedora at the grub prompt :
> [...]
> ata2 failed to respond (30 secs)
> mkrootdev: label /1 not found
> mount: error 2 mounting ext3
> mount: error 2 mounting none
> switchroot: mount failed: 22
> umount /initrd/dev failed: 2
> Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!
>
>And that's it...
>I can boot in rescue mode ("linux rescue" at boot prompt ) and mount the file system in rescue mode.
>With Fedora 2 and the latest kernels (2.6.8) I had somewhat similar problems (same architecture exactly).
>With Fedora 2, I got the following message at boot :
>
>Kernel Panic : VFS  Unable  to mount root fs on unknown-block (0, 0)
>
>To be precise, my system worked fine with Fedora 2 and kernel 2.6.5-1.358 (and yes options in grub.conf were the same in fedora 2).
>
>Thus, my main questions are to the fedora list : what can I do (through kernel recompile, or grub.conf options)or whatever) to adress the issue ?
>Any suggestion is welcome...
>
>Alexandre
>
>  
>
I posted the exact same problem last week. Then I answered myself. Let 
me see if I can dig that up. Here it is. I hope it helps:

[11/11/2004]

The main problem appears to be that support for the SATA hardware wasn't 
being loaded in the initrd. When I created a new image using mkinitrd 
with "--with=sata_via", I got past the initial kernel panic and the 
system booted.

Or mostly. Unfortunately, it eventually had lots of IRQ 10 errors and 
then died. At some point (correct or not), I copied my old 
/etc/modprobe.conf file back to the current one, which didn't seem to 
have much of anything in it. I also added "acpi=off" to my  kernel line 
in /etc/grub.conf. The latter seems to have allowed eth0 to work again. 
While running in single user mode without the network (this was actually 
before I tried acpi=off), I made a CD-RW disc with the new udev rpm and 
updated that.

It looks like the system is mostly working now. I'm running yum update, 
which is taking awhile to get all of the updates. Then I'll start 
figuring out whether everything is really working and try to see what 
the implications of "acpi=off" really are. It clearly solves a big 
problem, but does it cause other problems?


[back to the present day]

I'm a real newbie, so I hope that makes sense. The gist of it is that 
you need to create a new image that contains the SATA stuff. It seems to 
not be included by default because the modprobe.conf is missing stuff it 
shouldn't be.