Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

redcrayon · Joined: 08 Jun 2005 Posts: 1

I have finally got a pen drive to detect and start the boot of Puppy, but half way through I get this error message:

VFS: cannot open root device "<NULL>" or unknown-block(3,65)
please append a correct "root=" boot option
kernel panic - not syncing: vfs: unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(3,65)

If someone could let me know how to get past this problem, or point me in the right direction, it would be much appreciated.

My syslinux.cfg says "root=/dev/ram0" (not sure if thats helpful or not)

BarryK · Posted: Thu 09 Jun 2005, 10:48 Post subject:

I got a kernel panic message like that awhile ago, not with Puppy though.

I had GRUB or LILO dual booting a PC with three different Linuxes.
One of them gave the kernel panic, because the kernel used did not match the "initrd" (the initial ramdisk) -- the boot manager was using the initrd of the first distro.

So, your installation appears to be installed wrong. A kernel is booting, but the wrong image.gz or initial ramdisk is loading.

Did you use the USB install Wizard to install to the pen drive?
...it would have created a correct syslinux.cfg file and put the correct files on the pen drive.