In the event that something goes wrong with my desktop, other than a problem with the hard drive, I want to be able to boot from the hard drive that normally resides in my desktop but with it connected as an external hard drive to my laptop.
My laptop is a Thinkpad R51. In the BIOS there is an option to boot from: -USB Hard Drive. I don't know what the '-' in front of the USB is for - none of the other USB boot options has a dash in front of it.
I've compiled a 2.6.8 kernel, on the (external) hard drive, to suit the Thinkpad and the Thinkpad will start to boot from that drive after I select the special kernel but stops with a kernel panic:
VFS: Cannot open root device "30e" or unknown-block(3,14) Please append a correct "root=" boot option Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(3,14)
The Linux root partition on that disk is partition 14.
When I've had this sort of problem before it's been because I've had and IDE opion either unset or set as a module instead of being compiled in but I've checked and rechecked and cannot see what is wrong.
The relevant IDE kernel settings are:
# # IDE chipset support/bugfixes # CONFIG_IDE_GENERIC=y CONFIG_BLK_DEV_CMD640=y # CONFIG_BLK_DEV_CMD640_ENHANCED is not set CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDEPCI=y CONFIG_IDEPCI_SHARE_IRQ=y # CONFIG_BLK_DEV_OFFBOARD is not set CONFIG_BLK_DEV_GENERIC=y # CONFIG_BLK_DEV_OPTI621 is not set # CONFIG_BLK_DEV_RZ1000 is not set CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDEDMA_PCI=y # CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDEDMA_FORCED is not set CONFIG_IDEDMA_PCI_AUTO=y # CONFIG_IDEDMA_ONLYDISK is not set CONFIG_BLK_DEV_ADMA=y # CONFIG_BLK_DEV_AEC62XX is not set # CONFIG_BLK_DEV_ALI15X3 is not set # CONFIG_BLK_DEV_AMD74XX is not set # CONFIG_BLK_DEV_ATIIXP is not set # CONFIG_BLK_DEV_CMD64X is not set # CONFIG_BLK_DEV_TRIFLEX is not set # CONFIG_BLK_DEV_CY82C693 is not set # CONFIG_BLK_DEV_CS5520 is not set # CONFIG_BLK_DEV_CS5530 is not set # CONFIG_BLK_DEV_HPT34X is not set # CONFIG_BLK_DEV_HPT366 is not set # CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SC1200 is not set CONFIG_BLK_DEV_PIIX=y # CONFIG_BLK_DEV_NS87415 is not set # CONFIG_BLK_DEV_PDC202XX_OLD is not set # CONFIG_BLK_DEV_PDC202XX_NEW is not set # CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SVWKS is not set # CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SIIMAGE is not set # CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SIS5513 is not set # CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SLC90E66 is not set # CONFIG_BLK_DEV_TRM290 is not set # CONFIG_BLK_DEV_VIA82CXXX is not set # CONFIG_IDE_ARM is not set # CONFIG_IDE_CHIPSETS is not set CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDEDMA=y # CONFIG_IDEDMA_IVB is not set CONFIG_IDEDMA_AUTO=y # CONFIG_BLK_DEV_HD is not set
I copied the kernel config from the laptop initially and changed the IDE settings to suit the hard drive on the desktop.
Can anyone suggest anything I have missed?