Error "panic: all VFS_MOUNTROOTs failed: Need DRIVERS?????"

[MilliganRS]

System OS: HP-UX 11.0
System: B180L

Some techs cut off the power to the circuit my system was plugged into. After a time the UPS failed, and it crashed. Power was restored, and it rebooted fine, then they cut power again. No battery this time, now it doesn't reboot, so they call me. The main errors I'm getting are:

"WARNING: Kernel symbol table verification failed"
"panic: all VFS_MOUNTROOTs failed: NEED DRIVERS?????"

"A system crash has occurred
The system is now preparing to dump physical memory to disk, for use in debugging the crash."

It then tries to copy 31Mb of 512Mb, which does nothing and it reboots to repeat the process.

I tried to halt the process and run it with No Dump, Selective Dump, and Full Dump...none of which helped.

I then searched through the messages here, and tried:

1. Halted boot, used Info menu to check status of hardware (memory, cpu, etc), and all seems fine.
2. ISL > hpux -iS (fails, continues reboot loop)
3. ISL > hpux -lm (fails, same)
4. Tried booting from Alt path (failed to initiate)

I do have the option to reinstall from Ignite, but was really hoping from another option. My instructions for that include rsynching the system to be replaced, which I can't do. From what I've gathered, mostly from these posts, is that my disk is corrupt and can't mount the root volume? Thanks for any advice you can give me.

[melvyn burnard · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately, the message "panic: all VFS_MOUNTROOTs failed: NEED DRIVERS?????" covers a large number of varying possible causes, not all necessarily to do with hte kernel.
More often this is fixed quicker by a re-install than trying to figure out what may be wrong an get into the system to fix it.
One option is to use the Install/Recovery CD and boot to the Recovery side, and see if that can help you to recover.