[vox-tech] Kernel upgrade from Sarge (fresh install) 2.4.25 -> 2.6.3 or 5

[Peter Jay Salzman]

On Sat 01 May 04, 10:39 AM, me@heyjay.com <me@heyjay.com> said:
> Opps, forgot to post the meat of my message
> 
> Here's the kernel panic I get (copied by hand):

that's OK.  some of the finest works of literature and art have been
done by hand.

> VFS - Cannot open root device "hda1" or unknown-block(0,0)
> Please append correct "Root=" boot option
> Kernel panic: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)

well, this pretty much tells it all.  the kernel panics because it
doesn't know where to find the root of your filesystem.
 
> The steps I made in building my new kernel are as follows:
> 
> apt-get install libncurses5 libncurses5-dev make gcc g++ patch
> apt-get install bin86 kernel-package module-init-tools
> apt-get install kernel-source-2.6.3

all this stuff is irrelevent.

> bunzip2 -c kernel-source-2.6.3.tar.bz2 | tar xvf

this is irrelevent too.  but let me just say, that you can do this
easier with:

   tar jxvf kernel-source-2.6.3.tar.bz2

rather than:

   bunzip2 -c kernel-source-2.6.3.tar.bz2 | tar xvf

> ln -s kernel-source-2.6.3 linux

if this is not necessary for make-kpkg, i would not do this.

> cd linux
> cp /boot/config-2.4.25-1-386 .config
> make menuconfig # didn't really do much here except make the processor type
> AMD

whoa there.  you're kidding, right?

you can't just use old .config files like that.  read the kernel
compiling howto and do a search on oldconfig.

i'm told it's better to start from scratch when going from 2.4 to 2.6.

> make-kpkg clean && make-kpkg -rev Custom.1 kernel_image
> cd ..
> dpkg -i kernel-image-2.6.3_Custom.1_i386.deb
> 
> reboot
 
i don't think this is relevent.

> Am I supposed to do something like:
> cd /boot
> mkinitrd -r /dev/hda0 -o /boot/initrd.img-2.6.3
> mv /initrd.img /initrd.img-old
> ln -s /boot/initrd.img-2.6.3 /initrd.img
> # Change my entries in /boot/grub/menu.lst
> 
> Honestly, I don't even know what this does, it seems important, because I
> had to do it when I was playing with software raid (on a different box).
> What does the the initrd.img file do/contain?
 
here's where we get to the relevent stuff.

i have no knowledge of grub, so somebody else will have to help you.  if
you had used lilo, the answer would be:

1. find where the root partition is using:

   mount | grep ' on / ' | awk '{ print $1 }'

2. in /etc/lilo.conf, use the above entry to fill in the "root=" entry.


have no idea with grub, but i always through grub automagically finds
the root partition...

pete

-- 
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