Red Hat Linux 5.0 Installation problem.

[David Lonsdale]

I tried installing the Red Hat Linux 5.0 onto the old 486 PC with 48MB RAM
and 500MB HD. After selecting the packages, the installation program
proceeded to set up the exf2 filesystem. But, in the middle of copying the
programs from the CD to the hard drive, (where 48MB has been reserved for
Linux Swap space and the rest for the Linux Native space), the installation
program froze and display an error message in the middle of screen:

Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 08:05

Does anybody know what this means? Is there a way I can fix it?

David Robert Lonsdale

[Moe Trin]

Post by David Lonsdale
I tried installing the Red Hat Linux 5.0 onto the old 486 PC with 48MB RAM
and 500MB HD.

I realize that not that many modern distributions will operate on something
that old and small, but 5.0 was a real dog. It was the version Red Hat used
to introduce the glibc2 libraries, and there were a LOT of problems with it.
RH5.0 came out seven years ago, and was only supported until April 1999.
RH 5.2 would be a better version if you need such an old distribution (but
it's also been unsupported since October 2001). Something modern like Debian
or Slackware will fit, and are supported.

Post by David Lonsdale
After selecting the packages, the installation program
proceeded to set up the exf2 filesystem. But, in the middle of copying the
programs from the CD to the hard drive, (where 48MB has been reserved for
Linux Swap space

That's quite a lot of swap for a distribution that old. Our 5.2 installs
tended to only need 16 Megs with that much RAM - and I don't think we used
swap on systems with 64 Megs of RAM.

Post by David Lonsdale
and the rest for the Linux Native space), the installation
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 08:05

You are telling the system you want to use partition 5 on the first SCSI
drive (/dev/sda5). If this is correct, are you using the correct kernel
parameters and SCSI controller? Does the partition exist? If I interpret
you correctly, you say you only have two partitions, and partition 5 has
to be a logical one (contained with an extended partition - probably 2, 3,
or 4).

Post by David Lonsdale
Does anybody know what this means? Is there a way I can fix it?

Have you looked for suggestions in the installation guide? We only looked
at 5.0 (and 5.1 - we stayed with 4.2 until 1999 when we jumped to 5.2),
and that was _years_ ago - but as I recall there was a decent book that
came with the real Red Hat, and an electronic version of the book was
also included on the first CD. If you are using a GPL version, I can't
say because there were so many different versions, some of which only
included the binarys and IDE install program on a single CD.

Old guy