Comment 4 for bug 628084

I seem to have the same issue "cannot find root file system"
I installed LinuxMint 9 KDE Live DVD onto my systems 20gb ATA hard drive configured as a Slave Drive with an Optical Drive attached as Master. The install went OK except the Optical drive was not available after booting to the 20gb hard drive after install.

I did a good search for read that some others had this issue and so they changed their boot loader to from grub to lilo.

So, I decided to do a clean install and used lilo for the boot loader.

I booted to a USB with LinuxMint9 KDE i386 Live which and attempted to install. Install fail at attempting a full format and install.

I attempted to do a manual configuration by deleting all the partitions and creating just one primary partition of ext4 and flaged for boot. This failed. Some error about corrupt superblock.

So I tried booting to the LinuxMint9 KDE i386 Live DVD and it stops at "cannot find root file system"
Then I tried to boot and intall from Kubuntu 10.04.1 i386 and LinuxMint 9 xfce i386 and again the same error.
I tried booting to Legocy 2010 Live CD and got similar issue of it could find or load a sfs file all in bright red letters.

Next I tried cleaning up the hard drive with a windows 98 boot disc. I ran fdisk and deleted all the partitions and ran fdisk /mbr a few times. I created a FAT32 primary partition and set it to active and transfered system files.

So I tried booting to the LinuxMint9 KDE i386 Live DVD and it stops at "cannot find root file system" again. I proceded to try other Live linux cds of : Kubuntu 10.04.1 i386 and LinuxMint 9 xfce i386 and again same errors.

Finally I tried the Legocy 2010 Live CD and got it working. Once inside the Legocy 2010 Live CD OS I launched the install and it requested I manually format my hard drive with ext2 and also a 500mb swap. I then used gparted that was included with this distro to resize my partition leaving 512 mbs at the end open. I put an extended partition there and then a logical partition into that and formated it as linux-swap. I formated the primary as Ext2 and hoped that was right.

Then I ran the install and followed the prompts to put the Legocy 2010 distro on the 20GB hard drive.