Installing Ubuntu on new SSD Yields, "Kernel Panic"

adravas

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Oct 23, 2012
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Hello, my name is Shoutist. I have recently purchased an SSD drive, 128gb for my desktop computer. ATI Radeon 4850 graphics card, ASUS motherboard, intel i-5 processor. I tried installing Windows 7 on it, but I keep getting "Windows cannot install required files....Error code: 0x80070570". Because of this, and multiple failed attempts at fixing it, I have decided to install Ubuntu. I created a PENDRIVE out of my 4gb flash drive, and put Ubuntu 12.10 onto it. I kept getting a "

Kernel Panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(8,1)" error. I made this drive using Universal USB Installer. I then tried using Ubuntu 11.04 and re-formatted the flash drive. I used Unetbootin to put ubuntu 11.04 onto the drive. I get to a menu screen with a few options, but after selecting "install ubuntu" the same error message "kernel panic" arises. My question is, why does this keep happeneing, and how do I fix it? I have done a lot of research on the web but none of it makes much sense. Many people say open the grub or grub2 command line and do such and such commands, but I can't do that if I don't have an os installed...
 
Hello friend, sorry about the kernel panics.
First make sure the MD5 sums for your downloaded iso match up with the ones distributed by ubuntu. It could simply be a bad download.
Second if md5 is good, try lili instead of 'universal usb installer' I suspect this is your issue :)
http://www.linuxliveusb.com/

never had luck with unetbootin or universal usb, but lili has always been faithful to me :)
 

adravas

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Oct 23, 2012
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I tried out Lili, and I like using that better than the other two, but it still didn't work. I got the same error message again.

md: autorun
md:...autorun DONE.
VFS: Cannot open root device "null" or unknown-block(0,0): error -6
Please append a correct "root=" boot option; here are the available partitions:
125034840 sda driver: sd
102400 sda1 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000
124930048 sda2 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000
1048575 sr0 driver: sr
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount to root fs on unknown-block(0,0)
Pid: 1, comm: swapper/0 Not tainted 3.5.0-17-generic #28-Ubuntu
panic+0x81/0x17b
mount_block_root_+0x1aa/0x23d
? sys_mknod+0x2d/0x30
mount_root+0x5e/0x64
prepare_namespace+0x14e/0x192
? sys_access+0x25/0x30
kernel_init+ox1b1/0x1b6
? loglevel+0x2b/0x2b
? start_kernel+0x363/0x363
kernel_thread_helper+0x6/0x10
 

adravas

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Oct 23, 2012
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I would try checking the MD5 sums but I do not know how to do that, and I don't think that is my problem. I downloaded the distros from the source websites. Thank you for your suggestions though.
 
Checking md5sums under linux is easy:
Code:
md5sum filename.foo
on windows: http://www.md5summer.org/
It does not matter *where* you download from, if you had a bad download and this does happen, then you could very well be getting errors. always check md5sums!

If I were you, I would try to burn a dvd image and try to boot from that. to rule out the possibility of something going wonky with the usb drive.

If that doesn't work there must be something more specific going on with your SSD or motherboard/bios. Even more suspect because of the windows error message!
Try reset all bios options. Then maybe try disable AHCI in bios? this is the case on a old laptop of mine.
 

jmlm-1970

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Nov 4, 2012
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That seems to be an hardware failure using Ubuntu software architecture... That fault is hard to discover, my guess is CPU overload or some bridge overload due to high speed disk communication... I have a similar situation when I boot from USB3 port, but, if I boot in the USB2 port everything works, which proves that software and configuration is OK, the solution is just to make things work slower, if you want try connecting an USB Hub 1.1 which will force the 4 GB PEN to work at 12 Mbps!
 

nigelren

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May 20, 2011
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OK - I read 'This happens upon booting the live USB. It throws the kernel panic error when I choose the install option so it can never install' - which would mean that it boots into the USB stick - but fails when he selects the Install option. Which is different from failing to boot from USB.