Why am I getting Kernel Panic VFS cannot mount root fs on 301?

Joe Burks (jburks@wavicle.org)
Wed, 4 Jun 2003 14:14:39 -0700


Unfortunately I cannot copy the exact text I'm getting, but it is something
similar to that. Now that I have time again, I desperately need to maintain
drivers/usb/media/vicam.c again and am trying to boot 2.5.70 to do so.
Here's what I've tried:

Freshly installed debian woody
Freshly downloaded 2.5.70
Downloaded, compiled and installed init-module-utils 0.9.12 from Rusty's site.
Downloaded, compiled and installed latest devfsd (although it currently does
not seem to get to a point where this would matter, it never mounts the root
fs in order to start devfsd)
Carefully followed instructions in Documentation/filesystems/devfs/README on
setting up devfs for the impatient.
Configured kernel, including enabling devfs and devfs_mount.
make bzImage modules modules_install install (not in one line, one at a time)
went into lilo.conf and added an append="root=<device>" line, then re-ran
lilo. (where I say <device> I have tried about 100 different possibilities
ranging from easy ones like /dev/hda1 or /dev/discs/disc0/part1 to
/dev/ide/...) Obviously I only get the "301" error when the root= line is
missing and I let lilo write that magic value.

No matter what root= line I supplied it just wouldn't boot. I've also tried
devfs=mount, devfs=nomount all to no solution. So in frustration I rebuilt
the kernel without devfs, since I figured that is where my problem was, but
the exact error is still occurring. I tried both leaving in a root= and
removing the root= append line with devfs not installed.

I can still boot fine with whichever kernel woody installed (2.4.16 I think).

I don't think this is a devfs problem. I think there is some subtle (or maybe
blatantly obvious) kernel option I have not checked which would cause the
whole situation to go away.

Does anybody know what this option is?

Thanks
-Joe
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