Debian Sarge kernel panic, can't find / ?

From: Jeff S (four_season_photo_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 03/30/04 

Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2004 14:47:18 -0700

Been having some really wierd problems with Debian Sarge:

Newly compiled kernels hang the system, with an error message along the lines of "Kernel Panic: You must specify a valid root partion". Sounds pretty straightforward, BUT! My GRUB menu.lst file appears to be in order, and ext2, ext3 and reiserfs support are all compiled into the kernel, not as modules, and I am not relying on an initrd, though I have support for it enabled.

hda is partitioned as follows:
/hda1 ntfs
/hda2 /boot [ext3]
/hda3 swap
/hda4 / [swap]

I am compiling from the Debianized kernel 2.6.3 source, using gcc 3.3.

Now here's where it gets stranger: On a previous install attempt, I did successfully compile kernels, and in fact, I saved a .deb package of the kernel, the tar'd source and the config file. If I install the previously-compiled kernel .deb, it works just fine. But if I compile anew using the very same config file, and the very same source code, I get the exact same kernel panic! Always this exact same kernel panic. And this is using the very same notebook computer, and the same Debian CDs. The only diff between the earlier install and this one (that I can think of off the top of my head) is that I repartitioned the disk, using a 1.1G swap partition instead of 600M. But the partition types, and their ordering, are unchanged. Suggestions would be really welcome!

Jeff

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