[plug] was (Debian)Thanx to all..now Apologies to all

[Desire'e]

Wow I apologise to all and sundry who suffered through the unedited diatribe
that i unwittingly posted.
I was using Outlook and had forgotten it is set to automatic send.
I thought it was sitting in the 'drafts' folder. - waiting for
"refining".-.mmm..

Poor David (bk at bofh.ns.ca) tried to unscramble my ravings....
in answer to your statements/questions David...
( also the error message in question is quoted verbatim below)


>when people recompile the kernel for the first time, they do not know what
>to enable or disable. First of all, if you do not have an SMP machine,
>disable SMP and RTC. If you use IDE, enable IDE block device and IDE
>harddisk into the kernel (not as modules). They're named
>CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDE and CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDEDISK in .config/Configure.help if
>you want to know.


It is not actually the first time i have compiled.
I have compiled under RedHat and Caldera a few times now.
Under Debian only twice before this kernel release and those were successfull.
I was grasping at straws when i recompiled "Just in case" i had left something
hugley important out"

..
> What you recompiled has no influence over the rescue disk's kernel unless
> a) you recompiled the kernel specifically for the rescue disk and replaced
> it b) bad hardware (unlikley in this situation).

What i meant was that i could only boot successfully from a floppy. And
therefore couldnot do a -dmesg / screen dump of the error.
 And yes it was compiled / created when i recompiled the kernel ( force of
habit).
however I have it now....
ERROR MESSAGE:
{it boots LILO fine.
goes through the list of drives(cdrom,floppy,harddrive,scsi)
starts PPP
gets to...}( and this is verbatim)
PARTITION CHECK:
request_module [ide-disk]:Root fs not mounted
hda: driver not present
VFS: Cannot open root device 03:01
KernelPanic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:01




> 
> IDE support? name the options you enabled from .config.

it would be a hell of a list but the block devices etc are the same as under
previous successfull compiles.


> 
> methinks you're looking at the wrong place.

That is what im asking...
ive looked in...
1)Lilo.conf
2)Initab
3)Fstab
4)Mtab
5)kernel...

Im out of ideas where else should I look?????




> 
> I don't understand. A capture from your screen would be of more help as we
> have no idea what you're typing. we're not mind readers you know.

What i mean is simply  I cannot mount a floppy.
Be it a ext2 format
or msdos format.
Even using the mount -t command...i get bad superblock message on any floppy i
care to insert....





> 
> -David (bk at bofh.ns.ca).
> 
> NOTE: If you want to use a 2.2.x kernel with debian slink/2.1, have a look
> at http://www.debian.org/~rcw/2.2/warnings.html for neccessary upgrades.
> 
> Also, it's Debian, not debain.


YES i know....It was a typo.......................