Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:01

I just thought I would keep you up to date on my progress of trying to make this machine boot up Linux. I was able to create the tomsrtbt floppy boot disk on a windows 95 system by booting up to dos and running install.bat. Here is what I got.
1. I booted up the tomsrtbt disk and it went to boot:
    pause for 15 seconds.
2. Loading bz2bzImage....................
3. Press <Return> to see video modes available, <Space> to continue or wait for 30 seconds.
4. VFS: Insert root floppy and press Enter.
    With the same floppy disk in it says.
5. Unable to handle kerner NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 00000008. Several Stack numbers and code: numbers came up and locked up the computer.

What do you think I should do now? I still don't know what type of Linux I'm dealing with or where I can enter commands to see what is actually on the hard drive at this point.

It's beginning to look like this box has a hardware problem, as evidenced by (4) and (5) above. To be certain I'd like to know if the tomsrtbt floppy that you made will boot up to a normal Linux prompt on some other machine. It doesn't matter what OS the test machine is running and just bringing up Linux from the floppy won't harm anything.

I tried a little test and here is what I found out. Someone recommended that I try a tomsrtbt bootable floppy on another system to see if the disk was any good. They said it doesn't matter what OS is on the system, it would not hurt it. So I did, and here is what it said.

1. RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 867.
2. It asks me for a selection of keyboards.
3. It telling me to login as "root" under the tty1 tomsrtbt login:
4. It asks for a password. It says use xxxx as a default.
5. Finally it ends with Sweethorn, the 4th day of the Aftermath in the YOLD 3168 with a # sign blinking.

I'm assuming that this is what it is supossed to do. If so, why would the original linux system not work? Hard drive or maybe it needs a another floppy drive or something to make it work properly? That still doesn't explain why the original hard drive just stop loading Linux. What do you think?

Yes, that's exactly what you should see if the floppy is used on a system with good hardware. Since we now know that the floppy is good it looks more and more like there is a hardware problem with the failed Linux box.

From the description of what happens when a disk or floppy boot is attempted I'd say that the problem probably lies in the Motherboard, processor, or memory. It's  been my experience that a failed or failing disk will still allow the boot floppy to work, but obviously other hardware problems would prevent that. The next thing to try would be to move the disk from the failed system to some other box and see if the boot floppy will work there. In all probablility there's one disk drive and it is set for Primary IDE master. So it's pretty simple to pop the Primary IDE master out of some other system and cable up the disk from the failed system. Obviously if the failed system is a SCSI system you'd need to move the controller (assuming a PCI SCSI controller) also.

Generally, Linux isn't all that sensitive with respect to hardware. If the failed system is an IDE based box, you can probably get the disk to boot in just about any motherboard with IDE controllers. SCSI based systems need a bit more care. The SCSI drivers are built into an initial ramdisk, so the disk won't boot in some other box unless the original SCSI controller is present.

Ok, I put a another floppy drive in because someone told me that an ls120 will not work and the tomsrtbt disk works like it should ending with Sweethorn, the 4th day of the Aftermath in the YOLD 3168 with a # sign blinking. Does that mean that the hard drive is corrupt or not working properly? If so what steps or commands can I take to see what the problem may be? It's an IDE based box.

Okay, one hardware problem is solved. Now to see if the disk is sane. For an IDE system try:

fdisk -l /dev/hda
--or--
fdisk -l /dev/hdb

and for a SCSI system try:

fdisk -l /dev/sda
--or--
fdisk -l /dev/sdb

You'll see from the above that IDE systems refer to disks as /dev/hd?, where ? = a, or b, or c, or d. SCSI systems use /dev/sd?, where ? = a, b, c...h. Since we don't have any hardware information about the box just try all the possibilities until you find the disk or run out of possibilities. Start with IDE and thats the most likely configuration.

Ok, thanks. Do you know of some commands I can use incase the hard drive is bad, I might put in a temporary hard drive just to copy the important stuff off the old drive?

If the only problem winds up being some corrupt or missing files that prevent booting, you'll otherwise be able to access the drives contents. On the other hand, almost all of the drive failure modes that could prevent the system from booting will mean that nothing on the drive will be accessible.

The first order of business it to see if the partition map is valid (fdisk -l) and if any of the Linux partitions can be fsck'd and mounted. Once that's been determined the most appropriate course of action will probably become evident.

Well, I took the system home last night and learned a little bit about Linux. I booted tomsrtbt, ran fdisk then e2fsck and fixed the hard drive. It now boots properly. It must have been corrupt files or a bad MBR or something. You have been a great help, thank you very much.