Hello, I am having a kernel oops on startup that prevents me from starting up.

Not sure how to do a printscreen so early in startup, but here is a bit of what is on the screen that I have typed out shorthand:

Caching service dependencies [ok]
Setting system clock to hardware clock [Local Time]
oops: 0000 [#1]
CPU 0 ....Tainted: PF
blahblahblah.....
Call Trace:

seqprintf
print_unload_info
m_show
seq_read
vfs_read
sys+read
syscall_call

blahblahblah

Please help I don't know what to do. I have recompiled the kernel from fresh sources (2.6.1). The computer was booting up previously. The last time i shut down there was an error closing gdm, but everything else shutdown fine.
Anybody have any ideas? An explanation of how these kernel oops might happen would be awesome.

My guess is that the kernel oops happens during the hwclock call of the clock init.d script. Anyway to stop this?

Update: I moved hwclock from /sbin to another directory using my rescue cd, and it passes the system clock call with an error, but now when it wants to startx i get a system hang and a black screen (no lights on keyboard, caps lock doesn't change lights, etc.).

My distro is gentoo.

This is going to be my last try with linux, I'll be back in winblows soon.

Bump....

Please. Anybody. If you don't know the answer, do you know where i could look for answers? Or any suggestions? Is this a lost cause? Do you need more information? How do i get that information? I'm semi-newbish

I don't know what you have going there, but if you compiled the kernel when you are realively new to this stuff, my bet is that your boot loader is not setup correctly. You need to check to see if you are poiting to the correct kernel and see if the old one is removed or has changed names.

I don't know how gentoo does things, but if you can get to the cli, then look at your either lilo.conf or grub.conf and check to see if your information lines up with the correct vmlinuz for the kernel or maybe the init file, which can be called different things, eh.

So, log in, goto /boot and see what's there. Open another terminal and see what /etc/lilo.conf or etc/grub.conf look like. You can draw a lot from there without further explanation by me. See if you can figure out if the information in that file lines up with the new kernel that you build (/boot), I assume without problems. If not, change your settings to match up with the latest kernel in /boot and maybe init file.

If it's not that, then I wouldn't know unless I was there to go from each point to the next, I'm afraid. Sorry about that. But, that is probably the place where most folks will get lost, imo, on the first time of compiling their own kernel.

Hope this helps, and I hope you don't give up because of this gentoo thing. There are other distros, and in time, you won't blink twice at this type of situation, and you will know what's up or the direction to take next.

-j

Thanks so much for the reply. I think I'm going in the right direction in recompiling the kernel with different options. I'm pretty sure I have grub configured correctly because I moved the old kernel out. Thanks, I'll let you know if i fix.

THANKS SO MUCH ON YOUR DIRECTION! I recompiled the kernel with enhanced real time clock support in it rather than as a module and IT WORKS! Thanks!