Ok, here's the history: a while back, I got my work laptop (Dell latitude C640) dual booting with winXP and gentoo. I was using grub as the bootloader, and after a little bit of tweaking, it's been working great since last september. I hardly ever really used the linux side of things though, until lately, when I've been using clusterknoppix 3.3 at home a lot. So, I figured that I'd wipe the gentoo side, and load clusterknoppix instead.

There are 4 partitions on the drive, hda1=windows; hda2= /boot; hda3= swap; hda4=/ . This was how it was set up when I was running gentoo.

So, i cranked up clusterknoppix, and created a persistent home directory on hda2.

Then, I rebooted (to use the persistent home directory) and ran knoppix-installer through the config part, then saved the config to my persistent /home/knoppix.

Then, I went in and edited the config file, making a couple minor changes: I set hda4 to be a reiserfs file system (like it was with Gentoo) and I also used the 'experimental' bit about mapping drives, to map /boot to my former /boot partition, hda2. then, i cranked knoppix-install up again, loaded the config file, and away I went.

Here is where things started to get funky. I didn't want to blow away my Grub install in the mbr, so in the config i selected lilo to install on the root partition (hda4). That way i figured that since the MBR would look at Grub, all I'd have to do was change a couple lines in grub, it wouldn't be a problem. The installer finished up, so i took a look at my new /boot partition, and all my old files were there, with the new ones from Knoppix. initrd, map, vmlinuz, the usual.

So, i re-wrote grub.conf to use the correct filenames with the new setup:

my grub.conf file:
Code:
original (with gentoo):
default saved
timeout 15
splashimage=(hd0,1)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title=Gentoo Linux
root (hd0,1)
kernel (hd0,1)/boot/kernel-2.4.20-gentoo-r6
initrd (hd0,1)/boot/initrd-2.4.20-gentoo-r6
savedefault

title=Gentoo Linux kernel rebuild
root (hd0,1)
kernel (hd0,1)/boot/firstbuild
savedefault

title=Windows XP
root (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
savedefault
Code:
the newest one, with clusterknoppix:
default saved
timeout 15
splashimage=(hd0,1)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title=ClusterKnoppix-Debian
root (hd0,1)
kernel (hd0,1)/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.24-openmosix-1
initrd (hd0,1)/boot/initrd.gz
savedefault

title=Windows XP
root (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
savedefault
Now, when I try booting from the HD, grub opens fine, and when i select my Knoppix, the last few lines before Kernel Panic are:

Code:
RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
Freeing initrd memory: 98k freed
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem).
kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k block-major-8, errno=2
VFS: Cannot open rood device "" or 08:01
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel Panic: VFS: unable to mount rootfs on 08:01
I'm not exactly sure what do to at this point, I tried all sorts of "root=" options in grub, and i just can't get it to work. Is the problem something with the modprobe error? is it something with the reiserfs filesystem? Should I re-do the whole thing using ext3 instead of reiserfs?

Anyway, what are your thoughts?

--sarge