First install of Salix seemed to work find after a couple of minor questions. Removed the drive with Salix on it while testing out some other distros, now replaced the Salix drive but won't boot:
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(8,18)
Pid: 1, comm swapper Not tainted 2.6.37.6 #3
Any suggestions.
Thanks
Kernel panic - noy syncing: VFS
Re: Kernel panic - noy syncing: VFS
Probably the device ordering and thus the device names changed. I suggest you boot from Salix Live and run Lilosetup, that's the easiest solution.
Alternatively you can boot from any linux system (to make it easier it should be binary compatible i.e. x86_64 is bin. compatible to i486 but i486 not to x86_64). You can mount Salix and chroot into it. Then you can check what the device name has changed to and exchange it in your /etc/lilo.conf. Finally run lilo -v to apply the changes. Probably you need to mount sysfs, proc, etc too.
If this doesn't mean anything to you go for lilosetup.
Alternatively you can boot from any linux system (to make it easier it should be binary compatible i.e. x86_64 is bin. compatible to i486 but i486 not to x86_64). You can mount Salix and chroot into it. Then you can check what the device name has changed to and exchange it in your /etc/lilo.conf. Finally run lilo -v to apply the changes. Probably you need to mount sysfs, proc, etc too.
If this doesn't mean anything to you go for lilosetup.

Re: Kernel panic - noy syncing: VFS
Yes, I suspect it is to do with the order of disk drives. I have pretty well concluded that Linux doesn't exist very well in multi-disk environments. Thanks for you advice but as Salix is nice and small I decided to reinstall rather than download another CD.
Cheers,
Cheers,
Re: Kernel panic - noy syncing: VFS
Yep, definately the case that Salix doesn't like multi-disk systems.
Works fine when Salix is the only disk drive in the system but add another disk drive or two and the Kernel panic sets in. Current error is:
Works fine when Salix is the only disk drive in the system but add another disk drive or two and the Kernel panic sets in. Current error is:
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Kernel panic - not syncing: No init found.
Re: Kernel panic - noy syncing: VFS
There's a solution to this. Use UUIDs or LABELs everywhere. That's no problem for /etc/fstab, but you'll have a hard time with Slackware and the root parameter passed to the kernel. To use anything other than plain device names for the root parameter, you need to build an initrd with udev that can resolve those values at boot time. I never tried this with Slackware nor lilo. But I'm fairly sure lilo won't be the failing link.
Running this should create such an initrd:
And replacing this line in /etc/lilo.conf
with
should make it work for lilo. Of course you can also replace uuid by label. Don't forget to run!
Also have a look at this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pe ... ice_naming
99% of this should be valid for Salix too after quickly skimming over this. Ignore the mention of mkinitcpio, that's what I wrote about mkinitrd for Slackware.
Oh, and this problem doesn't generally appear on all systems. For example on my main machines I've got two disk drives and the device names are stable. It heavily depends on the hardware setup. For example when the drives are attached to different controllers, the order in which they come up might not be stable. Whereas on the same controller this doesn't usually happen.
Should try this myself when I have some time for it again.
Running this should create such an initrd:
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mkinitrd -c -u
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root = /dev/root
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initrd = /boot/initrd.gz
addappend="root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/<root part uuid>"
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lilo -v
Also have a look at this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pe ... ice_naming
99% of this should be valid for Salix too after quickly skimming over this. Ignore the mention of mkinitcpio, that's what I wrote about mkinitrd for Slackware.
Oh, and this problem doesn't generally appear on all systems. For example on my main machines I've got two disk drives and the device names are stable. It heavily depends on the hardware setup. For example when the drives are attached to different controllers, the order in which they come up might not be stable. Whereas on the same controller this doesn't usually happen.
Should try this myself when I have some time for it again.