NEWBIE red hat install VFS: Cannot open root device

[quell]

I decided to get rid of XP and try out Red Hat 8.0. I put in the cd and booted off it with the below error.
I insterted a 98 start up disk and fdisk /mbr then reformated the drive with fat?? then booted off cd again and get the same error. I went into bios and disabled virus warning, tried to set bios back to default config still no luck. I tried installing Suse with same prob. Both red hat and suse boot right into this error and stop. I'm new to this and don't have a clue and I don't have a manual hehe
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanx in advance.

FS: Cannot open root device 00:00
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 09:00

 

[quell]

tried a different hd with same prob, so think its in the bios somewere.

 

[smah]

Are you using any overlay software for your hard disk?

 

[quell]

overlay software??

 

[quell]

theres nothing on the hd I just reformatted it with fdisk

 

[Morsing]

Quell,
the linux installation kernel doesn't have drivers for your CD drive. Is it a special kind??

Cheers

Henrik Morsing
Certified AIX 4.3 Systems Administration
& p690 Technical Support

 

[FluxAnomaly]

Quell

I have the same problem that you have, actually i just logged in to post the problem to see if someone had a clue about this, i tried red hat 8 and an old slakwarte 7 i had altough both yielded different errors i think the result was the same it couldn't mount root to start the setup,
i tried this with 2 different hard drives a 10gb disk and a 80gb disk, the 10gb drive already had slakware installed, it booted ok, but the setup is still failing.
i know i don't use overlay soft, i read somewhere that it could be that lba is enabled for the disk but i disabled it and still didn't work.
I believe its a bios problem, could it be the ram?

Here is my config

Mother:MCI KT4
RAM: 256 MB (DDR 333Mhz)
Athlon XP 2000
GeForce 4 MX440

If any one as a clue i will be forever thankful, i am gettin desperate about this.

Thanks in advance

 

[quell]

I finaly gave up and tried to reinstall xp but now that wont work either it gets halfway through the setup and stops. So decided to try another pc laying around and it worx fine. Even was able to get an ircd going on it As for the other pc I dont know whats up with it.

 

[FluxAnomaly]

Same with me, i tried the setup on an K62 box i had, and it worked fine after that i switched the hard drive back into the other pc and the kernel booted ok, it even detected most of my hardware so i'm happy now.
As far as i could find out, it's a mixed problem between the processor and the motherboard
I have an athlon XP, and a MSI KT4, my guess is that the mother is screwing somewhere problably with the APIC or is passing some weird info to the processor, anyway i'll try to find out what it was.

what is your hardware specification?

 

[quell]

Mine was a Pent 500 with 128 ram dunno what type of MB it is. I tried clearing the bios with the jp5 jumper and that didnt work either.

 

[FluxAnomaly]

i did the same, but it didn't help.
you could try the following
at the setup's boot promopt:
linux noapic mem=128M

and just in case try disabling APIC in the bios, i heard this is a cause to this problem.