I'm not familiar with slackware, but to me it sounds like you might
need to make a new initrd image with the appropriate drivers. It seems
odd that it didn't happen automatically, but if it can't mount the
root fs, that sounds like a driver problem to me.

On 5/17/06, Josh Trutwin <josh at trutwins.homeip.net> wrote:
> I recently upgrade a kernel on my laptop (slackware 10.1) from 2.6.15
> to 2.6.16 (using "make oldconfig" from 2.6.15's kernel config).  I
> pulled up lilo.conf and just replaced 15 with 16 and reran lilo - no
> problems.  Now when booting though I get this fun message:
>
> Kernel Panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on
> unknown-block (3,4)
>
> Did some googling which seems to indicate this is a problem with a bad
> root= option - but that didn't change when I changed lilo.conf so I'm
> not sure what the deal is.  I use boot=/dev/hda2 and root=/dev/hda4
> and tried typing these in as options from the boot screen - no love.
> I'm wondering if maybe I missed something in the kernel upgrade that
> could be causing this?  What's odd about this though is I cannot even
> boot using my old kernel either.
>
> Thankfully I have a boot floppy so I can still boot and re-run lilo or
> rebuild the kernel.  Just curious if anyone had similar problems and
> has any advice.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Josh
>
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