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vfs:unable to mount root fs on unknown block(8,7)

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Jul 6th, 2008
Running home desktop - Intel core 2 duo 2.0 ghz with 250gb hd and 2.0 mb ram.

Multibooting XP, Mepis, Kubuntu, and Mint. Installed a 40 gb scavenged HD (drive 2) to install Mepis on. Planned to copy some files from Mepis on drive 1. Booted from the Mepis live cd and couldn't repartition HD2 to my satisfaction from gparted. Re-booting into Acronis Disk Director and was sucessful in re-partitoning HD2 with intentions of installing Mepis 7.0. Decided to boot into Mepis on HD1 and print out the menu.lst file. That is when I got the message.."Kernel panic - not syncing. No init. Try passing init= option to kernel."

HD2 is listed as ATA ST34810A. It should be good since I just removed it from another computer and it was working when I removed it.

I can boot into Kubuntu, Mint, and XP. Only get the kernel panic when I click on the Mepis grub entry. It is the first entry in the menu.lst file.

Booted the Mepis LiveCD and reinstalled GRUB to the MBR of sda (hd1) pointing to the partition that holds Mepis on that disk. Still no change.

Installed Mepis on HD2, wrote grub to MBR on hd2, and edited the menu.lst because for some reason Linux thinks HD1 is sdb instead of sda like it was before. I can boot into Kubuntu, Mint, XP on HD1 and Mepis on HD2 but not Mepis on HD1.

I then re-installed mepis on hd1 and let Grub be installed to the MBR of hd1. I didn't reformat my /home directory because I wanted to keep some of the documents I had saved. Then I went back and edited Mepis menu.lst on HD1. I got all the sdas and sdbs straightened out and still could not boot into Mepis on HD1. I did some more googling and found something that made me look at the fstab file. Sure enough there was a problem there with sda and sdb being reversed from what they should have been. Edited that and then when I tried to boot into Mepis on HD1 I get the following:
VFS: unable to mount root. fs on unknown-block(8,7)
I have done some googling for this error but mostly I find stuff that is way over my head it seems. Does anyone know of a solution that might understandable to someone that is not knowledgeable in networking or servers?

Sorry for the extended length. It seems that I am in way over my head. Mepis is my favorite distro and would really like to get it booting again.

Thanks,
Harold
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