Kernel panic during first boot - disks invisible[SOLVED]

[Ahenobarbi]

I'm trying to install Gentoo on my old laptop. I used Sysresue CD ( and it worked fine). Grub works fine, however kernel writes some thing like

[Rexilion]

What it says is, it needs a block device it contain treat is as it's root device .

Simply, you have grub like this:

root(hdx,x)

kernel /boot/linux-kernel
initrd /boot/etcetcetc

You should make it like so:

root(hdx,x)

kernel /boot/linux-kernel root=/dev/sda1
initrd /boot/etcetcetc

The /dev/sda1 is just an example, you should change it to the default disk where your gentoo installation is residing (not the boot partition).

[Ahenobarbi]

I already have root=/dev/sda2 in my kernel line. I also tried root=/dev/hda2 and realroot=/dev/sda2 .

[Mike Hunt]

Boot the installCD mount / and /boot just like during the installation and post the output of these please:

• fdisk -l
  
• lspci
  
• cat /mnt/gentoo/etc/fstab
  
• cat /mnt/gentoo/boot/grub/grub.conf
  
• ls /mnt/gentoo/boot

[DONAHUE]

first time out you had no disk controller drivers.
second time, after ripping sysresccd, you had drivers however they were modules, so were the file systems. grub can't install modules. you would need to boot an initrd/initramfs with grub that in turn loads kernel with modules.
BTW, the sysresccd configuration is designed to have everything possible in the kernel as modules.

Pappy's kernel seedswill provide you with a solid lightweight starter kernel configuration and links on how to work with it.
posting as Mike asked will facilitate getting more help. lspci -k better than lspci for these purposes; it identifies drivers/modules the running cd system uses as well as the devices.

[Ahenobarbi]

[DONAHUE]

your config for disk controllers should be:

[DONAHUE]

fstab:

[Ahenobarbi]

It helped, thank you DONAHUE. And thanks for pointing wrong swap partition info.