Marc Abramowitz » Fixing an unbootable VMware VM after upgrading your Linux kernel

9/21/2007

Fixing an unbootable VMware VM after upgrading your Linux kernel

September 21st 2007 Posted to Linux, Software

It seem that some of the newer Linux kernel versions (2.6.21 and 2.6.22) don’t like the LSI SCSI adapter emulation in some of VMware’s products. I myself ran into this when I upgraded the kernel on a Gentoo VM (VMware ESX Server 3.0.1) to 2.6.22. After rebooting, the system could not find the root partition.

It took a bit of searching to figure out what the problem was, but the solution was simple. Change the VM to use the BusLogic SCSI adapter instead of the LSI.

Some references: