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kernel panic not syncing VFS Lubuntu

Asked by chris warren

Following advice from a Ubuntu pundit, I decided to give it a go on a old Pentium II laptop I travel with, that has given me years of work with XP.

But after booting from DVD "Ubuntu 11.10 sixpack" choosing English, then Lubuntu, and immediately crash....

Main message is:

Kernnel Panic - not Syncing: VFS: UNable to mount root fs on unknown-block(8,1)

Anyway, turned power off - rebooted and extracted DVD, and no damage done to laptop.

The laptop is IBM Thinkpad 600e, with 290 meg memory.

I do not think anything is wrong with my laptop.

I did not get any stage asking whether I wanted to install or run from LiveCD etc.

What to do?????

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Chris (fabricator4) said : 		#1

It could be an internal problem with the DVD. I don't know what the six pack is but it sounds like an unofficial spin containing several releases with different DEs.

You should probably go to this official site :

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/releases/11.10/release/

and download

lubuntu-11.10-desktop-i386.iso
and
MD5SUMS

There should be enough RAM to run the desktop version of the CD. When installed properly on the machine it will run in less than 128Mb.

After you've got the two files mentioned, you should check the md5sum of the iso you downloaded against the value for that iso listed in the MD5SUMS file.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HowToMD5SUM

Next you should burn the CD at the _slowest_possible_speed_. This will give you the best chance of getting a reliable boot CD.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BurningIsoHowto

when you boot the CD up you should get a menu with various options, one of which will be to test the integrity of the CD. You should do this to make sure the burn was good.

Once it all looks good, run "try Lubuntu" off the bootable LiveCD and see how you go with it.

I certainly agree that Lubuntu is the best choice for an older machine with a small amount of memory. (It will probably be faster than XP was).

Chris

Revision history for this message
Chris (fabricator4) said : 		#2

And yes, the LiveCD will not change anything on your hard drive just by booting and trying Ubuntu. You'll only be making permanent changes to your hard drive once you start installing Lubuntu: you should back up any important data on that machine before proceeding.

You can also just install to an 8GB USB pendrive if you wish. It boots very slowly of course but is quite usable once it's up and running.

Chris

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