FC12 install causing kernel panic not syncing vfs

[hobbeston]

Hi,
I had FC10 working nicely but decided to move to FC12 to be able to use the latest and greatest... Turning out to be nightmare!

My HDD is partitioned into three:
(hd0, 0) 100MB : used to be original /boot for FC 10
(hd0, 1) 120GB : /home
(hd0, 2) 30GB : /

> First thing tried: preupgrade

Using this preupgrade setup happend and asked to reboot. However, upton reboot got locked in stage2. So this option was abondoned.

> Second thing tried: installation CDs

Using this method formatted (hd0,2) and installed FC12 on (hd0,2). However, did not change anything on (hd0,0). This still held all the upgrade information from the previous trial. Now, when I rebooted after the install there was a kernel panic with error "kernel panic not syncing vfs". Thinking it might due to the (hd0,0) partition and errors in my install, I abandoned this.

> Third thing tried: installation CDs

Using this method I formatted both (hd0,0) and (hd0,2). The install was similar to above but now (hd0,0) was also formatted and after install was empty. But upton reboot I still got the "kernel panic not syncing vfs" message. I dug through google and saw references to problems in grub.conf and lo behold there were problems with my grub.conf. I don't see the initrd line at all nor do I see the initrd*.img file in my disk. The grub.conf is:
---
default=0
timeout=0
splashimage=(hd0,2)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora (2.6.32.9-70.fc12.i686.PAE)
root (hd0,2)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32.9-70.fc12.i686.PAE ro root=UUID=d4549849-e92a-43c7-8ad3-d7e9a13dd200 LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=us rhgb quiet
---

Please help! I have spent nearly 1.5 days doing the move from FC10 to FC12. Any ideas?

Thanks,

[rockdoctor]

Originally Posted by hobbeston

Hi,
I had FC10 working nicely but decided to move to FC12 to be able to use the latest and greatest... Turning out to be nightmare!

My HDD is partitioned into three:
(hd0, 0) 100MB : used to be original /boot for FC 10
(hd0, 1) 120GB : /home
(hd0, 2) 30GB : /

> First thing tried: preupgrade

Using this preupgrade setup happend and asked to reboot. However, upton reboot got locked in stage2. So this option was abondoned.

> Second thing tried: installation CDs

Using this method formatted (hd0,2) and installed FC12 on (hd0,2). However, did not change anything on (hd0,0). This still held all the upgrade information from the previous trial. Now, when I rebooted after the install there was a kernel panic with error "kernel panic not syncing vfs". Thinking it might due to the (hd0,0) partition and errors in my install, I abandoned this.

> Third thing tried: installation CDs

Using this method I formatted both (hd0,0) and (hd0,2). The install was similar to above but now (hd0,0) was also formatted and after install was empty. But upton reboot I still got the "kernel panic not syncing vfs" message. I dug through google and saw references to problems in grub.conf and lo behold there were problems with my grub.conf. I don't see the initrd line at all nor do I see the initrd*.img file in my disk. The grub.conf is:
---
default=0
timeout=0
splashimage=(hd0,2)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora (2.6.32.9-70.fc12.i686.PAE)
root (hd0,2)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32.9-70.fc12.i686.PAE ro root=UUID=d4549849-e92a-43c7-8ad3-d7e9a13dd200 LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=us rhgb quiet
---

Please help! I have spent nearly 1.5 days doing the move from FC10 to FC12. Any ideas?

Thanks,

You can try booting off a live CD, chrooting to the partition containing your new FC12, then

cd /boot
dracut

On my F13 system, I used dracut to create the file /boot/initramfs-2.6.33-1.fc13.i686.img and I have a line in /boot/grub/grub.conf that points to it.

[JEO]

dracut needs a lot of room to create the initramfs files (much more than mkinitrd did). So you should increase the size of your /boot partition to about 500MB.

Edit: if you are saying that you no longer are using a /boot partition but putting the /boot files in your / partition disregard the previous. A change from a seperate /boot to a single root might mess up an upgrade from one version of fedora to the other. I suggest booting from an installation media in rescue mode and running dracut.

[hobbeston]

Hi,
Thanks for the suggestion.

I resolved the problem as follows:

> used FC12 DVD instead of installation CDs
. this installed a previous version of the kernel

> while doing the disk partition, I chose / to be forced to be the primary partition
. the /boot that I had from previous installation for 100MB is not used anymore