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Kernel Panic on boot.

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bkm:
Greetings All,

I found a small stack of old laptops (ThinkPad 600x) that I wanted to make useful again. I am going to try to set them up for Ham Radio use for a few friends locally. I downloaded the v5.5 of Tiny Core and Core Plus. The Tiny Core boots but the Core Plus has a Kernel Panic error. These laptops all have hard drives and 320meg of RAM. I wanted to use the CorePlus distro because it had all the tools for setting us the laptops. Anyway... the error reads like this:

.Decompressing Linux... Parsing ELF... done
.Booting the Kernel .
.Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(2,0)

This occurs on all three laptops I have tried and yet the regular Tiny Core live cd boots just fine!?!

Any ideas? What might I be missing here? :-[

I have re-burned the disk several times and checked it against the MD5 code and everything looks good. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

BKM - KJ4WRD

Misalf:
No idea why the two ISOs behave differently, but I'm sure you could just install using TinyCore-5.4.iso and when done, copy over all extensions from CorePlus-5.4.iso since kernel and initrd are identical - only the boot loader entries are different.

bkm:
Ha ha ha.... If only the mystery ended there.

It turns out the 4.7.6 and 4.7.7 core plus CDs both generate a 'unpacking error - system halted'

I gave up and used the tiny core 4.7.6 live CD to boot, downloaded the tc-install.tcz and started from there. Of the 4 different versions of core plus CDs I tried, none would work on these laptops.

At least I was able to get something started. It just took a lot longer than it should.

It seems strange that all the tc live CDs I tried worked and all the core plus CDs failed for various reasons specific to each version. Very weird indeed.

Thanks. This one will just leave me stumped I guess.

BKM

curaga:
The first error indicates the initrd was not loaded, the unpacking error points towards faulty hardware. The thinkwiki page indicates official maximum RAM is 288mb, so your config seems to be more than the hardware can handle.

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Unofficial_maximum_memory_specs

bkm:
Well, I didn't think the memory size would be a problem since it worked with a Lubuntu install. Son to be sure I removed one men card and reduced the total to 192mb. Still get the same error.

I also booted these disks on 3 different laptops of the same model and configuration. All three exhibit the same errors. Seems extremely unlikely that the same hardware malfunction or error could exist on all of the laptop examples. Since I had a a stack of 7 identical laptops, I tried all of them. All failed exactly alike.

The think wiki does not list an unofficial mem limit for this model. Only the official limit of 288. When the laptop was released there were not higher density ram cards available but the PC was built with the sa,me men controller as their big brother desktops, so when the higher capacity cards came out the following year, they plugged in and worked fine.

I don't buy the idea of the unpacking errors are hardware related because they occur on all examples of this PC.

Again, I don't really care about the error at this time since I worked around them, but I posted this hoping it might trigger an idea with one of the developers around the differences between the tc live CD and the core plus CD that might be causing this. I just wanted to alert to the possibility of the two different CDs using very different resources on the PC.

BKM

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