Hello everybody!

I did a stage3 installation recently on my PegasosII. I have placed the kernel image on /dev/hda1, witch is a affs partition. The root (ext3) partition is on /dev/hda4. Now for a test boot, i type 'boot hd:0 kernel-2.6.11 root=/dev/hda4' at the SmartFirmware prompt.
The kernel starts up, but then goes "panic": 'VFS: cannot open root device "hda4" or unknown-block(0,0)'
What did I do wrong? Is it some kernel config thing? Any idea?

Hello rogerius and welcome to ppczone.

What did you use to partition your drive?
Which filesystem did you use for your root partition?

Hello!

So. I used ext3 for root, and i have used parted for partitioning.
Meanwhile i tried to put the kernel image to the root partition, and used "boot hd:3 kernel... root=/dev/hda4". (Because in SmartFirmware 'ls disk' shows that hda:3 is the 4th partition.) The kernel boots, but says that cannot mount root fs. I checked fstab, but seems ok. (Compare to gentoo handbook)

One time I had the same problem and it was caused by a misconfigured kernel...
You had likely forgot to select the right IDE chipset driver.
Check in the "Device drivers">"ATA ATAPI... support" if you have selected "PCI IDE chipset support" and then "Generic PCI bus-master DMA support" and above all the "VIA82CXXX chipset support" that is the Pegasos IDE controller.