Kernal panic - not syncing: Attemped to kill init!-d000
 

Just did a clean install of CentOS 5.1 under vmware running on Windows 2003 Server x64. When I try to run my virtual instance of CentOS, I get the following error:

Kernal panic - not syncing: Attemped to kill init!-d000

The server is a dell powerrdge with a PERC6i SAS RAID Controller. Below is a screen shot of all the output from the console when trying to start.

Thanks for the help guys!

http://www.ftoperations.net/screen_shot.jpg

It is just possible that this is a kernel bug. If so, can you boot centos from a live cd or rescue disk? You can then run "chroot /dev/root yum update kernel" or just "yum update kernel" to update the kernel and download a fix (5.1 has been out for a while, so there is bound to be a release for a bug this serious by now).


I don't exactly know how Vmware exposes the filesystem to the guest operating system, but I have seen reports on Google of people getting it to work with this image: http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/1138

I also found a tutorial, which may be of some help, here: http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/tut...are-part1.html


There are several error messages in this screenshot.

The first is "error inserting /lib/libata.ko", which means that the kernel can't load the ATA driver that it needs to access the hard disks. It also offers the information "Unknown Symbol in Module", which means that the module is relying on something else which is not loaded into the kernel.

The next line is about ata_piix.ko, which is also needed to access your particular type of hard disk.

Did you compile the kernel yourself? I guess not since you said you just did a clean install, but I'll say this anyway in case it helps someone else: If so, then you might try again, but this time compile in the ATA/ATAPI driver, rather than having it loaded as a module, to avoid this problem.

"could not find root filesystem /dev/root": Because it can't access the hard disk, it can't find the filesystem that is stored on the hard disk. Without a root filesystem, the kernel has nothing to load the bulk of the operating system from; in particular, it can't load the init program, which is needed to run other programs.

Because there's nothing else it can do, the kernel panics (it's way of saying that an error has occurred and it's going to stop running completely), and it also warns you that it's not syncing, meaning that anything you've told it to write to disk will not be written (in this case, because it can't talk to the disks).

Hope that helps,

—Robert J Lee

rjlee,

Thanks for the reply.

Yeah it is almost as if it doesnt have the Dell PERC6i SAS RAID Controller driver.

That is weird though because the CentOS installer found the disk and was able to partition it for me and furthermore install CentOS.

No I did not compile the kernel myself. I simply downloaded the image from a CentOS mirror.

Bump, any other ideas? I may try installing Fedora and see what happens.