Dr. Blinn and Thierry Faidherbe both came up with similar answers to this problem. There would be a bad link in the /etc/fdmns directory, a problem with /etc/fstab, or the device special files got corrupted. Thankfully this was a standalone system, so it made the troubleshooting less complex.
I tried a reinstall of the operating system, and everything seemed to run fine over the weekend. This was an unpatched, rush-it-out-the-door-on-Friday install, however. When I came in on Monday to patch it and make it work right, I was unable to boot off the disk again.
I called HP hardware support, and got a replacement disk for the workstation. We did a clean install from there, restored everything from a backup server of the same type, and got it up and running. It turned out to be an intermittent hardware problem, specifically at boot time.
Thanks for the pointers on this.
Best regards, and Happy New Year,
--Blake Roberts
Electric Reliablilty Council of Texas
broberts_at_ercot.com
Office: 512-225-7178, 512-248-3086
-----Original Message-----
From: Roberts, Blake
Sent: Thursday, December 26, 2002 11:29 AM
To: Tru64-Unix-Managers_at_Ornl. Gov (E-mail)
Subject: Unable to mount root filesystem
Folks,
I'm in the process of doing a rolling upgrade from 5.1 to 5.1A. On one XP1000 workstation, after the subsets are loaded and it goes to reboot on the new generic kernel, it gives a kernel panic: "vfs: unable to mount root device."
I've successfully mounted the disk after booting off of the CD-ROM, so I don't believe the disk is bad. This failure happens right after the NetRAIN configuration part of the boot sequence. When searching the newsgroups, I only found this problem in linux, which I can assure you, I am not trying to boot. :)
If anyone has any ideas, they would be greatly appreciated. My other 3 XP1000's upgraded without any problems, so this seems unique to this machine.
Best regards,
--Blake Roberts
broberts_at_ercot.com
Received on Tue Dec 31 2002 - 21:12:47 NZDT