OpenSuSE 11.3 Kernal Panic After Kernel Update

English Install/Boot/Login
1

I had a thread open on my tiny boot partition but apparently the kernel auto updated Sunday morning so I rebooted this evening. (I made none of the changes we discussed to /boot and menu.lst looked good.)

The message I get is:

1.770075 Kernel Panic - not syncing. VFS: unable to mount root FS on unknown block (0,0)

I can boot into rescue mode off the installation DVD but could not find the Rescue facility. Other threads seem to indicate it has been removed.

I am fairly conversant in Linux stuff but am not sure where to begin, esp. using the rescue mode.

Could some one either point me to the rescue facility or give me some direction using rescue mode.

/boot is a separate ext4 FS. root is on a separate ext4 FS using LVM.

2

Additional information: This is a 64-bit OS. All FSes are ext4. /boot is a standalone (not LVM) partition. root, /var /tmp and swap are LVMs contained in a larger partition.

I was able to boot from the installation DVD into rescue mode and mount the /boot partition and examine its contents but when I tried to mount the /dev/sda2 partition which is divided into several LVMs it would not mount.

If this system cannot be recovered, is there anyway to access the nonOS LVMs and copy their data to another system via rsync or whatever will work. I have created a second OSE 11.3 system which does not use LVM.

Any help at this point would be appreciated.