[tlug] Kernel/device/FS boot problem

["David J Iannucci" <jlinux@example.com>]

I wonder if anyone here can provide a clue to get me moving in the
right direction on a problem I'm having.  I've got Gentoo installed on
my new Lenovo Thinkpad X61 tablet.  I'm trying to rebuild the kernel
(to latest version 2.6.24-r4), and I think I've got everything included
in it that should be there, but when I boot, it crashes halfway through
with this message:

  VFS: Cannot open root device "sda6" 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)

I've googled around and found a bunch of other people complaining
about the same symptom, but there doesn't seem to be any commonality
in the answers, where there are even suggestions provided.  Some
people just had their grub.confs configured wrong.

I know this is a problem with the way the kernel is compiled because
I can boot just fine off of an old kernel, and the grub.conf entries
for the two are basically identical, so it's not a bootloader issue.
It's gotta be the kernel.  I've gone through the menuconfig for both
the old (working) and new one in side-by-side konsole tabs, and I'm
sure I've set everything appropriately based on the old kernel settings.
Certainly the file system drivers (ext2,ext3) and so on are there
(and are not modules).

I've got /boot on a separate ext2 partition, if that means
anything... Thanks in advance for the smallest hints you might
provide.

Dave