I am working with a RH 9 system that has a mission critical software application inistalled on it. Yes...I know RH9 is OLD but it is neccessary in this particular instance!! Anyway, upon system startup it goes into the processes listing and then hangs at

Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing inti= optionto kernel

I was not the person who "broke" the system but I am the one who has to fix it, so I am not sure what was done to the system to facilitate this error. My fix requirements are 1. do not loss the data on the system and 2. do not rebuild the OS.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to recover from this erro? Thanks.

LGP

Sounds like somebody by mistake deleted something they should not have deleted. Does the system have an older kernel to boot with??? If yes then try that one. If no then boot using the installation media into rescue mode and try installing the latest kernel from one on the legacy mirrors.

http://fedoralegacy.org/download/fed...cy-mirrors.php

Maybe your bootloader isn't telling the kernel where the root parition is, so it can't find /sbin/init

verify that /sbin/init is avaiable (maybe using a live CD and mounting the partition to find it)

then check your boot loader

verify that the line kernel:

(these instructions for GRUB only, i don't know LILO)
now i could be very wrong about the diagnosis, but since this should be an easy fix if your bootloader is corrupted, you might as well try this first

That problem most commonly indicates that your bootloader is messed up. However it could also point to a corrupted filesystem or to a hardware failure (hard drive, hard drive controller) in progress.

Using a Live CD, run fsck on the system partition while it is not mounted and see what happens. If fsck doesn't want to run claiming the partition is clean, force it ( -f option). If fsck reports errors, whether or not you force it, then you better take a good look at your system logs; there might be evidence of a drive or controller failure present in the logs (I/O errors on the HD are a good indication).

Then check in /boot/grub (if you are using grub...most are these days) and look at menu.lst. In menu.lst you should see the line as pointed out by lambchops468.

If your filesystem checks out OK and your menu.lst is OK, then probably someone has deleted something in /bin or /sbin and you'll have to fix it before you can boot.