I have just installed gentoo and everything was fine until i decided to try to use grub instead of lilo. I am dual booting with. When i boot i get the following error.

ds: no socket drivers loaded
Kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modpobe -s -s to lock-Major-s, error = 2
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic: VFS : unable to mount root fs on 03:04

my grub.conf file looks like this

default 0
timeout 30
splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz

title=Gentoo Linux 2.4.28-gentoo-r8
root (hd0,1)
kernel (hd0,1)/kernel-2.4.28-gentoo-r8 real_root=/dev/hda4
initrd (hd0,1)/boot/System.map-2.4.28-gentoo-r8

title=Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1


my fstab looks like this
/dev/hda1 /windows ntfs noauto,ro 0 0
/dev/hda2 /boot ext2 noauto,noatime 1 1
/dev/hda4 / ext3 noatime 0 0
/dev/hda3 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/cdroms/cdrom0 /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,ro 0 0
/dev/cdroms/cdrom1 /mnt/cdrom1 iso9660 noauto,ro 0 0
#/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto 0 0

none /proc proc defaults 0 0

none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0



any help would be very much appreciated as gentoo take half a lifetime to install. Thanks in advance.

Now, I'm completely un-aware of any reason to put the System.map in the initrd line, but whatever floats your boat. Since you have the line "root (hd0,1)" you do not need to include its location on every consecutive line. Also, did you use genkernel or compile manually? There are to many unknowns for my answer to work, but your welcome to try.

Yeah, about that System.map, I was just trying things and forgot to change it back. I changed the code to what you said, but the errors stayed the same except hda4 changed to ram0 and 03:04 changed to 01:00. Thanks again for your help.

which filesystems did you include in the kernel? Which filesystems are you using?

i'm using ext2 for /boot and ext3 for /root