Kernel panic when running a newly compiled kernel

[madiyaan]

Hello,

I have a Ubuntu 9.10 netbook edition and I am trying to compile a patched 2.6.32 kernel.

I copied over my current .config file and compiled the kernel.

When I try to boot into my shiny new kernel, I get this:



ACPI: Expecting a [Reference] package element, found type 0
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown block(0,0)


Does anyone know how to debug this problem?

[EDIT]: I selected from grub the recovery version of my compiled kernel, and it gave me this message:



VFS: Cannot open root device "sda1" or unknown-block(0,0)
Please append a correct "root=" boot option: here are the available partitions:
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0, 0)
Pid: 1, comm: swapper Not tainted 2.6.32perfctr #2
Call Trace:
...


Note: I have been following instructions from here how to compile this patched kernel. http://debianclusters.org/index.php/Adding_Performance_Counters_to_the_Kernel

My goal is to use perfctr with 2.6.32 (I know PCL is available, but I want to use perfctr for my own reasons).


[EDIT2] Seems like in my grub2 menu.cfg, the difference between the working and non-working kernel is this:

The working kernel has (as the last line of menuentry):



initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-21-generic


while the non-working image does not have this line.

Note that I compiled the kernel using this command:



fakeroot make-kpkg --initrd --append-to-version=perfctr kernel-image kernel-headers


And I installed using this command:


sudo dpkg -i linux-image-2.6.32perfctr_2.6.32perfctr-10.00.Custom_i386.deb

Could this be the cause of the problem? Any ideas how to solve it?