[svlug] building SMP kernel - Debian - Grub - Kernel Panic

[Satyen Sheth]

Hi:

Wondering if I could be nudged to solve my kernel panic problem:

I have a Dell PowerEdge 1850 ( dual Xenon ) with lots of memory.
PERC 4e/Si RAID controller.

Debian - Installer(Sarge) with kernel 2.4.x comes up fine and
recognizes my RAID.
Boots to EXT3 filesystem and Life is happy.

* Now upgrading to kernel version 2.6.14
There is support left in for Ext2 + Ext3 +  ReiserFs + XFS

Compiled kernel:
       make-kpkg --revision=debian.2.6.14.SMP.v1.0 kernel_image


installed kernel
  dpkg -i <kernelname.deb>

** At this point /boot/grub/menu.lst gets updated to include the 2.5
kernel and symlink gets updated to enable booting to 2.6 kernel.


Upon boot to the 2.6 kerne, I get the following error:

"VFS: Cannot open root device "sda1" or unknown-block(0,0)
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel Panic: VFS: Unable to mount root ds on unknown-block (0,0)"


My prior experience has always been kernel upgrades when running LILO,
where I'd run lilo before rebooting, and then I can boot with a new
kernel.

Is there something similar I need to do when using grub?
Is my problem even related to grub?

I've run update-grub when booting _back into my old 2.4_ kernel.. I
think this just updates the menu.lst file right?

I've read that Debian kernels usually need to be built with the
'--initrd' flag.  This is something I've never practiced before and
have not run into any problems regardless.