Kernel Panic:VFS unable to mount root fs on 00:00 (RHEL3 LinuxVM)

[fusebox]

Hi folks!

Yesterday I successfully converted a RHEL3 physical machine to a VM onto a ESX 3.5 (update1) host witout any issues.I followed the VMWare KB article steps.But,have issues booting up the VM :

Below are the contents of some of the important files responsible for booting up the system.Am able to see all the partitions in the linux rescue mode. I also recreated the initrd.img for the VM. But,when trying to boot,I get the grub prompt and where I feed in the kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.21-4.EL root=LABEL=/ (tried /dev/sda2 too) .But,still get the above mentioned error.

Below are the screenshots. Kindly suggest as to what I am doing wrong or missing .Any alternate method?

Thanks.

[Texiwill]

Hello,

Moved to the appropriate forum.

What SCSI device did you use when you created the VM? LSILogic or Buslogic? In effect either the labels are bad or the SCSI device you have chosen has no driver on that version of RHEL3.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

[fusebox]

Fixed this issue. I was using Buslogic only,for some reason the /etc/modules was broken.Fixed the /etc/modules and got the system booted up.But,I am having issue with grub loader. I have made sure the grub.conf is set accordingly .But,for some reason the grub doesnt load the OS and gives me a grub prompt where I have to manually enter the kernel and initrd params to boot the system.grub reinstall also didnt work.Tried setting root(sd0,0) and root(hd0,0)..Still doesnt work..Grub refuses to boot up the OS.Maybe I am missing something.Not sure what that is.

[Texiwill]

Hello,

You will need to boot from rescue media and rebuild your grub config file. You can try doing that when the system is running, but sometimes it does not work. You may have to run 'grub-install' to get this fixed.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

[fusebox]

Issue resolvd.The culprit was the device.map file in /boot/boot/grub directory which was showing as sd0 instead of hd0.Replaced that and grub loader worked fine.

[salatielfilho]

What have you put on the /etc/modules ?

I am facing the same problem.

[jtfnley]

Here's what I did:

My ESX 2.5x Linux VM had "vmxbuslogic" as it's SCSI BUS, however, even when choosing it under ESX 3.5, for some reason in the .VMX file it would return to lsilogic. So I just manually changed the "lsilogic" within the .vmx file to "buslogic" and the VM fired up and ran...