Topic: kernel panic

[Erwan]

Hi,

After a Ctrl alt del shutdown my e-smith 5.5 (or 5.6.. don't remember what upgrades I did.. is that critical ?) doesn't restart : it tells me :

Kernel panic : no init found . Try passing init= option to Kernel

So after browsing the forum I found that CTRL+x at the Mitel splash screen shows the boot prompt, and I tried the following command :

esmith init=single

but still the same story, kernel panics and I am getting worried about the data/ apps on the hard disk...

what is my next step ?

Thanks everyone.

E.

[Michael P. Soulier]

Erwan wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> After a Ctrl alt del shutdown my e-smith 5.5 (or 5.6.. don't
> remember what upgrades I did.. is that critical ?) doesn't
> restart : it tells me :

Why are you using a three-fingered-salute instead of the shutdown/reboot options in the console menu?

> Kernel panic : no init found . Try passing init= option to
> Kernel

Sounds like your root partition failed to mount. Look for more errors than that. This is just a symptom.

> So after browsing the forum I found that CTRL+x at the Mitel
> splash screen shows the boot prompt, and I tried the
> following command :
>
> esmith init=single
>
> but still the same story, kernel panics and I am getting
> worried about the data/ apps on the hard disk...

That command is incorrect. You're telling the kernel that it can find the init executable at "single", which is incorrect. Power down the box completely, and see if it comes up cleanly. If not, single-user mode is

single

but I doubt that will help if the whole partition is failing to mount. If init is truly missing, you can tell it to use bash so you can look at the drive and figure out what to do next.

init=/bin/bash

Mike

[Michael Smith]

Alternatively, you can start your SME box with the boot floppy you made when you installed ... you did make one, right?  If you didn't, just run the install CD on another box & make the floppy.  Once you've booted the machine, assuming it boots, you can fsck your partition and/or use LILO to fix the boot problem.

If it never does boot, you're probably going to have to embark on the grand adventure of building up another Linux/SME install on another hard drive & trying to mount the old drive to get at the data.

Or you might try booting the machine with a Knoppix Linux CD and seeing if you can mount the hard drive that way.  You might even get lucky and be able to transfer your files across your network if Knoppix recognizes your NIC.

One more method would be to use Norton Ghost or the "Ghost for Unix" project (http://rfhs8012.fh-regensburg.de/~feyrer/g4u/) to copy the affected drive to another hard drive (so if it doesn't work, you haven't made matters worse), then rerun your install CD as an upgrade or do an upgrade-in-place to a later version, the idea being that the upgrade process may fix the problem.

Good luck!