Powerbook G4 kernel panic

[Nika Vidal]

When I reboot, after installing Dapper, I get this:

Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)

My partition table is:
/dev/hda4 Apple bootstrap
/dev/hda8 Root (xfs)

I got it working by chroot, loading installation cd and changing loaded kernel image, but after upgrading past Friday 4th the kernel panic had back again and now changing image doesn't fix it.

I don't know if any people has the same frustrating problem.

Excuse my poor english.

Thanks.

[Ben Collins (ben-collins)]

This is know. I'm not sure why, but I don't think it's a kernel bug even.

Easy workaround, install with ext3 instead of xfs.

[Nika Vidal (nikageek)]

I've heard a problem with xfs and grub, not with yaboot, is this the same?.

I'll reinstall with root partition in ext3 (home, usr and other can be xfs, can't them?).

Anyway, yaboot is trying to load from /dev/hda1 and it isn't in yaboot.conf, I dont know if it's the same bug.

Excuse my poor English.

Thanks.

[Ben Collins (ben-collins)]

Please attach yaboot.conf.

[Nika Vidal (nikageek)]

I've reinstalled with root partition formatted in ext3 filesystem (other partitions continue being xfs) and it fix the problem, so the kernel panic and the access to hda1 were induced by the root partition as xfs.

yaboot.conf wasn't changed from installation, I only added bfboot=hd: cause yaboot gave me an error, anyway I attach it.

The strange thing is that it works sometimes.

It seems this bug is fixed in edgy, I could know it before reinstall lol: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/yaboot/+bug/20719/comments/33

Thank you so much.

[Ben Collins (ben-collins)]

My best guess here is that mkinitramfs is not creating a valid initramfs on powerpc from an xfs filesystem. The message about not being able to mount the rootfs should not ever be seen so long as the initrd is valid.

The other possibility (which would explain the powerpc dependence of this bug) is that yaboot is not copying the initrd over to the apple boot partition correctly for some reason, caused by xfs.

Either way, this cannot be a kernel bug, mainly because if the initrd were places correctly, we would get to the initramfs and see a different message.

The part of the boot failure here from the kernel is completely unrelated to xfs, since it has not even gotten to the initrd, much less to module loading where the xfs module would be loaded.

[Nika Vidal (nikageek)]

I also think it's not a kernel bug (I didn't relate the bug report to it) cause the kernel panic appears at boot begin, when no modules were loaded.

In the other report they talk about yaboot as guilty one.

An initrd problem is also probable.

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

This bug is more than one year old. Can someone from this bug report confirm if it still affects latest Linux Ubuntu Gutsy PPC port?

It can be found here : http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/7.10/release/

[nglnx (nglnx)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to "New". Thanks again!