Why does my new kernel stop at boot up with the error message 'Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on ...'?

Updated -

Red Hat uses loadable kernel modules to dynamically add or remove capabilities in a running kernel. To be able to read an ext3 filesystem for example, the kernel must load the ext3 kernel module.

At boot time the kernel is loaded by a boot loader (GRUB or LILO for example). An initrd image that contains kernel modules needed at boot time is also lo...

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