Grub, help please

[Alexjfinch]

I've just come to the end of my gentoo installation and I'm going to boot into gentoo for the first time. Grub loads fine and I can see my linux there and I press enter to load it and all is good until I get a kernel panic.

"cannot open root device "hdb3" or unknown-block(0,0)
please append a correct "root=" boot option
kernel panic - not syncing: VFS : unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)"

Does anyone know why this is happening I can post my grub.conf if you want me to.

also my hard drive is hdb1-3 (1 being boot 2 swap and 3 root) so i'm thinking it's something wrong with my grub.conf because one of the lines says:

"root (hd0,0)"

but I don't think that is right as my hard drive is called hdb instead of hda/sda this is think the numbering is wrong.

Any ideas

Cheers gents

Alex

[faulkner132]

Grub starts it's number at 0. You could try changing the line to:
root (hd1,0)
which would be the Linux equivalent of hdb1.

[Alexjfinch]

cheers mate i'll give that ago,

Last night I built gentoo like 3 times, on my second attempt i forgot to setup the network at the beginning of the install, but I managed to get it to boot to find that out.

So now on my third attempt i got this problem, so I'm going to play with my fstab, kernel, and grub.conf.

[faulkner132]

Just curious, but is this your first Linux install?

I tried Gentoo as my first Linux distro and found I had to consistently put WAY too much time into issues like this, so I moved to Ubuntu where everything "just works".

Good Luck to you!

[Alexjfinch]

I've got abit of a view where if it's on a install cd and all you do is click next, then its just like windows where its generic for everything and you dont build it for your hardware capabilities. Plus I like portage, even though you can migrate it to other distro's it just isn't the same. I did it once on a laptop and it worked, but now I'm doing it on a different machine where I have to find drivers and I want to work properly for once . My friend has done it loads of times and runs it instead of windows, so he'll have a look if I don't work it out.

Cheers