[Charlug] debian help

[Pierre Abbat]

On Friday 18 May 2007 19:05, Benjamin Tyner wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm new to Charlotte and am looking forward to meeting fellow linux
> enthusiasts. I'll also take this opportunity to describe my latest
> woes :-) I've been a linux user for about 7 years but this one has me
> stumped. Right now I'm using Debian but that may soon change :-) I did
> an apt-get update and now I get a kernel panic on bootup -- it says
> "please append a correct "root=" boot option ... I had been under the
> impression that update doesn't touch the kernel ... anyway, if anyone
> has any ideas I'd love to hear them.

You should have your old kernel still listed in your grub or lilo 
configuration. Can you boot the old kernel?

What partition and filesystem are you using for root? My /boot is ext3 and 
my / is reiserfs. If your root filesystem is not compiled into the kernel, 
you have to have it in the initrd, which is in /boot, which means that 
whatever filesystem you use on /boot has to be compiled into the kernel and 
the initrd has to be made right. Failure to make an initrd could cause the 
problem you have, but the previous initrd should still be around.

Pierre