Very Computer

Goodness gracious alive! I have not the slightest idea of where to go
now. So far I have installed three differant versions of slackware with
cdu31a cdrom drivers and not one of them will allow me to boot a new
kernel after I finish compiling it. The specs for my computer are as
follows- 486 dx2-66
        16 megs ram
        dev/hda = 420megs = dos
        dev/hdb1 & 2 =520megs linux native & linux swap
I use a boot disk to bring up linux and dos is on the bootup. When I
compile new kernels it appears that all goes well, zImage goes well, and
I ussually have made zImage boot disks to boot with. Then it happens,
VFS: Cannot open root device 03:42
Kernel Panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:42.
I have also changed the Makefile to read- ROOT_DEVICE = /dev/hdb2 which
is where I have my linux native mounted and is e2fs. The only thing that
I havn't done I think is to change harddrives. I'm not sure if the fact
that I have 1048 sectors on my drive matters or not because I have heard
of people using more than 1024. Possibly it does. If anyone can give me
some insight as to the problem I will be very grateful.
 thanks,
    Joe

: VFS: Cannot open root device 03:42
: Kernel Panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:42.

what kernel version do you use?
I had a very annoying problem with a kernel 1.2.13 (it seems to have
been corrected in kernels 2.xx):
As, during bootup, the kernel has no idea about the fs-type of the root
partition, it tries to guess the fs-type from a so called 'magic number'
in the superblock.
The minix driver comes first.
Unfortunately, the place where minix fs put their magic numbers was reused
to contain the free inode count in a ext2 fs.
This will almost never cause difficulties....
Have you ever tried to boot a boot/root disk set and mount your root
partition manually?
If this works, just delete a couple of stale, unwanted files and have
another try.

Good luck,

Klaus.