"Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!" after Yum update, CentOS 4.4

TestedDoughnut · 02-14-2007, 12:34 PM

I've been having a whole world of problems with my CentOS 4.4 server. I did a yum update yesterday, rebooted, and now the system wont boot to normal run level. I'm currently only able to get into it in single user mode (run level 1), otherwise the kernel panics. At the moment I'm only able to access the system through KVM over IP (SSH is down for obvious reasons...), so I'm only able to get a screen of the end of the error. Here's the output:

Code:

Freeing unused kernel memory: 164k freed
Red Hat nash version 4.2.1.8 starting
Mounted /proc filesystem
Mounting sysfs
Creating /dev
Starting udev
Creating root device
Mounting root filesystem
mount: error 19 mounting ext3,usrquota
mount: error 2 mounting none
switchtoot: mount failed: 22
unmount /initrd/dev failed: 2
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

Now, I might be able to pull some logs to see if yum threw any errors, but I wont be able to get those until tonight after I get off work. Like I said before, I don't have physical access to this box, it's in a server farm in LA and I'm in Texas, so I probably won't be able to recover it with a live cd and whatnot. I'm pretty sure yum updated the kernel and this would be as easy as reverting back to the old one, but I'm still kinda a newbie to linux (but I try) and don't know how abouts to do that. As well, since this is hosted elsewhere and I actually have to submit reboot requests, it takes forever just to be able to test new settings if the system panics and I needa reboot (which agitates me-kinda since I usually learn from trial and error....). This really has me stumped, if anyone could shed any light on it I would be eternally grateful

.

Thanks in advance,
- M. David Bennett

TestedDoughnut · 02-14-2007, 05:25 PM

Quick update: I've been trying to change the grub boot order in /boot/grub/grub.conf, but none of my changes seem to be taking effect... Is there another location where CentOS possibly stores the grub.conf file?

I'm sorry if my questions seem a bit n00bish, I'm just trying to figure this out and google searches haven't yielded anything that has worked yet...

Much thanks,
- M. David Bennett

XaViaR · 02-14-2007, 07:24 PM

Dunno what you mean by "I've been trying to change the grub boot order in /boot/grub/grub.conf". If you changed the name or anything with the root filesystem name. You need to do a `mkinitrd` to re-creates the initial ramdisk. Please give more info on what "trying to change the grub boot order" means.

-X

TestedDoughnut · 02-14-2007, 10:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by XaViaR

Dunno what you mean by "I've been trying to change the grub boot order in /boot/grub/grub.conf". If you changed the name or anything with the root filesystem name. You need to do a `mkinitrd` to re-creates the initial ramdisk. Please give more info on what "trying to change the grub boot order" means.

-X

By "change the grub boot order" I mean I edit the grub config to boot into the old kernel by default. For some reason none of the changes I make in grub seem to apply. By that I mean I added a new entry, saved it, and when I rebooted the new entry wasn't there. Only the old entries. At this point I just wanna revert back to the old kernel. From my understanding that should be just as easy as telling grub to boot the old one, am I correct?

- David

btmiller · 02-15-2007, 12:50 AM

If you're in single user mode the root filesystem might still be mounted read-only, which is why no file changes are taking effect.

Try mount -o remount,rw /

and then edit the grub.conf file. I'm assuming /boot is part of your / partition here.

TestedDoughnut · 02-15-2007, 08:12 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by btmiller

If you're in single user mode the root filesystem might still be mounted read-only, which is why no file changes are taking effect.

Try mount -o remount,rw /

and then edit the grub.conf file. I'm assuming /boot is part of your / partition here.

No, it is quite not in read only. Single user mode doesn't put it in read only, emergency mode does. I'm able to edit and save changes to the grub.conf (and I even double checked to make sure changes were being saved in menu.lst) it's just when I reboot grub doesn't reflect my changes, and being that this is a dedicated server with almost no physical human interaction, the default setting is to give you one second to choose what to boot into. I'm starting to think they might have another device that they're booting off of....

Being that I need to get this up quickly, I'm going to probably just have my data backed up and reload the OS... eah.

- M. David Bennett

XaViaR · 02-15-2007, 12:22 PM

can you copy and past your (are retype it here) /boot/grub/grub.conf file? or did you already re-install?

TestedDoughnut · 02-15-2007, 04:22 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by XaViaR

can you copy and past your (are retype it here) /boot/grub/grub.conf file? or did you already re-install?

I would but the server is off line right now. I'm needing to expedite this so I'm going to just back up and reinstall. I didn't really have much that wouldn't be easy to restore, so it's not that big of a loss.. But still... I still wanna know what exactly went wrong. I'm going to try to reproduce this on my secondary box at home, though it did occur to me that I might not be able to in the case that this was a hardware or driver issue... eah.

Thanks to all who tried to help, it's really appreciated. That's why I like this site and linux in general, great community support

.

- M. David Bennett