Hey guys,
I'm setting up a new machine, and having some problems. In order to solve some other problems, the first thing I'm trying to do is boot from a GParted live CD. I can boot from the CD fine and I'm then prompted for extra boot options, but after selecting "Skip extra boot options" I get the message:

No GParted LiveCD found!!!
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

The motherboard is a Gigabyte S series GA-965P-DS3 and has only a single IDE port to which I have connected an HD plugged as master, and a cd-rom plugged as slave. Does anyone have any idea what I can do to get past this message?

Thanks a lot

Where did you get the rescuedisk from? Are there scratches or dirt on it (even minor dust particles?).

Booting is done from the socalled "boot loader", located on the first 512 bytes of the cd. The actuall system is a compressed filesystem that resides as a file on the joliet cd. thus it appears that part is either damaged or missing completly.

I suggest you seek another copy of the disk or get yourself a new rescue system.

As an alternativ you can install a another linux base installation on another partition and use that instead.

Thanks for the reply,
After reading your post, I decided to try it with a Knoppix live cd. I downloaded the iso and checked the md5, and then burned it. Unfortunately, the same type of problem is still occuring. The cd will boot, but then complain (in this case) that it "can't find the Knoppix file system." So I'm not sure why all of a sudden it's unable to find the cd after booting from it.
Any other ideas?

Thanks again

42

Sounds like you might have a bad cd/DVD drive. Can you check the disks in another machine?

Lazlow

I've already tried a few drives and I'm almost positive that the drive isn't the problem. After looking around, it appears that maybe this mobo has some problems when using only IDE, any ideas on things I could do to solve that?

Thanks

you need a 2.6.18rc4 or latter kernel which has the correct drivers to see the CDRom Probably not contained on the installation disk you are using

a totally different approach: Let's consider what happens when you boot. The kernel gets loaded into memory. Then the initfs. The initfs then tries to mount the root partition, which is actually a loopfs of a file contained on the cd. So if the file system can't be found:
a) the file is indeed damaged and is not recongnized as a fs or
b) the loopfs or the iso9660 filesystem are not supported or
c) the filesystem cannot be mounted as a loopfs.

The last point has the usual cause that there is not enough memory available on the system, though that would normally produce a clear error message during the processing of the initfs.

e2e remarked that a 2.6.18 kernel is needed to work with the cd. I am sorry to say that this is not at all trough. Live cd's are used since 2.4.. It is only a question of how many modules one can sqeeze into the kernel (if monolithicly compiled) or how many modules can be made available for modprobe to run through. On any knoppix system, the IDE/ATAPI protocol is fully supported and thus this does not represent any problem (except of course if you happened to hit the most exotic piece of hardware arount).

Two suggestions, though neither will propably be very herlpful:
1) Check if there is enough memory. Swap doesn't count, it gets enabled with swapon _after_ inittab was read and the bootscript (usually /etc/init.s/boot) executed.
2) try passing the -b option to the bootloader, though sulogin again is part of the bootscript...
3) try the cd on another computer, perhaps at work/school/university or at a friends. That way we will know if the problem you are expiriencing is hardware dependant or not