[plug] Speaking of kernel panics...

[Dennis Plester]

Like James, I had the same message last night, with my recently installed
Mandrake 7.2 using ReiserFS. 

kernel panic: VFS: Cannot open root device

Unlike James, I haven't been shifting around hard drives or moving
partitions, etc.

I then proceeded to fire up using a boot floppy, but it didn't proceed much
further, basically because all of my ReiserFS partitions were no longer
readable. Being new to this, I tried having a look using Linux fdisk, but it
could only recognise my first partition, which is FAT32 Win 98. My other
ReiserFS and swap partitions were one big continuous mess.

I then booted up using my Mandrake 7.2 install CD, and progressed to the
DiskDrake(I think it's called) section where you can view, move, delete,
create etc partitions during the install. It could not recover any partition
information, and described my entire 13Gb drive as one big unallocated
space.

I then booted up back into Win 98 through LILO, which was still working all
this time. Win 98 appeared to be fine, and scandisk revealed no obvious
errors, but when I fired up the Win version of Partition Magic 5, it also
stated that the rear (Linux) half of the disk was unallocated. It originally
had /, /home, /usr partitions in ReiserFS, and a swap partition.

During the last few weeks, I have not done any radical on my PC, just the
usual web surfing, email, cd burning, playing with PHP/mySQL and Quake 3 in
Linux. My windows activities have been virtually nil. I only use it as a
very expensive Playstation now, and I haven't even been doing much of  that
lately. There have been no file system or disk related errors reported in
either operating system for months.

Any ideas as to what might have happened? I've fallen back into my Windows
mentality and reinstalled Mandrake, with ext2 partitions until I get my
confidence back again. My system had run with ext2 for several months
without hassle until this recent install. Just for the record, I also put my
system through a RAM testing software suite that boots off a floppy, and it
came up completely clean.

If I face this problem again, is there an alternative course of action? Any
other comments or advice would be welcome.

Dennis.