*BSD News Article 81818


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From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: when does boot say "panic cannot mount root"
Date: 27 Oct 1996 09:38:13 GMT
Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden
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References: <32710A83.167EB0E7@gsfc.nasa.gov>
Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch)
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Andrew Szymkowiak <andrew.szymkowiak@gsfc.nasa.gov> wrote:

> When I boot a newly installed version of 2.2-961014-SNAP,
> it gets fairly far along, through all the device probes, and
> then says "panic: cannot mount root".  Any ideas as to under
> what conditions this message is produced?

When it cannot mount the root file system. :-)

>    There is one unusual aspect to my configuration; I am installing
> and booting from wd1.  I imagine that the rest of the world
> is using wd0.  For complicated reasons, I am not able to move
> this IDE drive from slave to master, so I cannot try it as wd0.

Watch out the messages.  The first to observe is at the boot prompt,
where you will be presented with a line saying

dosdev= 81, biosdrive = 1, unit = 1, maj = 3

(The above figures are for what i would expect wd1 actually being.)

It also tells you something like:

Booting 1:wd(1,a)/kernel @ 0x100000

Note that both numbers must be 1 for a wd1 disk.

Then, see what wd drives are being probed, and whether your wd1 is
there.

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)