VFS: Unable to mount root fs

[John Hawley <jhawley@bgea.org>]

I've been playing around with bare-metal backup/recoveries and am getting these
as the last lines on the console on boot:
...
kmem_create: Forcing size word alignment - nfs_fh
ds: no socket drivers loaded!
request_module[block-major-8]: Root fs not mounted
VFS: Cannot open root device "801" or 08:01
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel Panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 08:01
<hangs>

Any ideas on what this means?  This is kernel 2.3.99-pre9.  I've briefly
described the scenerio below.  I've also done the same scenerio with a
bare-bones Debian 2.1 installation with the 2.2.12 kernel and that recovery
worked fine!  I've played around with different combinations of boot= and root=
options in lilo.conf and with flagging and unflagging the fdisk 'bootable' flag
on sda1.  Can't seem to get it.
Is this some difference between the kernel versions or a bug in this kernel or
what might I be doing wrong?

Thanks for any insight.
-John

###################################################################
<skips over boring details of creating tar archive, burning to cd, blowing away
test system, booting recovery diskette, fdisk'ing, mke2fs'ing, etc>

#cd /  (on ramdisk created by rescue floppy)
#mkdir root
#mount /dev/sda1 root

... untar the archive to the reformatted harddrive.

#cd /root
check /root/etc/fstab
check /root/etc/lilo.conf:

boot=/dev/sda
root=/dev/sda1
install=/boot/boot.b
map=/boot/map
vga=normal
prompt
timeout=50
delay=20
image=/vmlinuz4
 label=linux
 read-only

# chroot /root /sbin/lilo
... this works; says 'added linux'; etc
... machine boots ok, but hangs

####################################################################

--
John Hawley
Network Administrator
IT Services // BGEA
612.335.1334 <=> jhawley@bgea.org