When the kernel gets into a situation where it does not know how to proceed (most often during booting, but at other times), it issues a kernel panic by calling the panic(msg) routine defined in kernel/panic.c. (Good name, huh?) This is a call from which No One Ever Returns.

The panic() routine adds text to the front of the message, telling you more about what the system was actually doing when the panic occurred ... basically how big and bad the trail of debris in the filesystem is likely to be. This is where the "not syncing" part comes from, and when you see that, it's good. (panic() does try to issue a sinc() system-call to push all buffered data out to the hard-disks before it goes down.)

The second part of the message is what was provided by the original call to panic(). For example, we find panic("Tried to kill init!") in kernel/exit.c.

So, what does this actually mean? Well, in this case it really doesn't mean that someone tried to kill the magical init process (process #1...), but simply that it tried to die. This process is not allowed to die or to be killed.

When you see this message, it's almost always at boot-time, and the real messages ... the cause of the actual failure ... will be found in the startup messages immediately preceding this one. This is often the case with kernel-panics. init encountered something "really bad," and it didn't know what to do, so it died, so the kernel died too.

BTW, the kernel-panic code is rather cute. It can blink lights and beep the system-speaker in Morse code. It can reboot the system automagically. Obviously the people who wrote this stuff encountered it a lot...

In diagnosing, or at least understanding, kernel-panics, I find it extremely helpful to have on-hand a copy of the Linux source-code, which is usually stored someplace like /usr/src/linux-2.x. You can use the grep utility to locate the actual code which caused the panic to occur.

what about when init dies normally("halt")?

I have this very message on my red hat Fedora system while trying to boot after installing a new cpu fan and necessarily disconnecting and reconnecting the several components to the board, which had to come out due to mounting screws UNDER the board. I have reset the date and time and I suspect some other item(s) need to be set correctly so boot can continue, but I don't knkow which ones. Can anyone instruct me? Here is the last page of messages seen while booting, and I don't know how to retrieve any that scrolled by before these came:

…………..other stuff I can’t see off the screen)

Buffer I/O error on device hdb, logical block 2
Buffer I/O error on device hdb, logical block 3
Buffer I/O error on device hdb, logical block 4
Buffer I/O error on device hdb, logical block 5
Buffer I/O error on device hdb, logical block 6
Buffer I/O error on device hdb, logical block 7
Buffer I/O error on device hdb, logical block 8
Buffer I/O error on device hdb, logical block 9
/dev/hdb: read failed after 0 of 2048 at 0: Input/output error
/dev/hdb: read failed after 0 of 2048 at 528023552: Input/output error
/dev/hdb: read failed after 0 of 2048 at 0: Input/output error
No volume groups found
/dev/hdb: read failed after 0 of 2048 at 0: Input/output error
/dev/hdb: read failed after 0 of 2048 at 0: Input/output error
/dev/hdb: read failed after 0 of 2048 at 528023552: Input/output error
/dev/hdb: read failed after 0 of 2048 at 0: Input/output error
Unable to find volume group “VolGroup00”
Unable to access resume device (/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01)
Mount: error No such device or address mounting /dev/root on /sysroot as ext3
Setuproot: moving /dev failed: No such file or directory
Setuproot: error mounting /proc: No such file or directory
Setuproot: error mounting /sys: No such file or directory
Switchroot: mount failed: No such file or directory
Kernel panic – not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

(and that’s all she wrote -- it freezes at that point)

This is a fairly un-educated guess on my part, but for what it's worth... looks like your IDE controller is freaking out, or the drive is corrupted. Could be that screw under the board shorted something out.

Yea probably shortted out the io controller.

I am having the same problem as sundialsvcs and John Sharp. If in fact it did short something, how would I figure that out or remedy it? At the lowest cost possible pls? I am not very well to do money wise. I make under 17,000 a year, and have a family to support as well as tons of bills. Free stuff rox, I love linux

Cheers for that explanation sundial

What if my machine boots fine in Windows XP? The Mandriva 2007 partition is the only boot that gives this problem....

I just experienced this same issue w/ a machine I was working on. The problem stemmed from the HDD being reconnected to the motherboard on a different IDE channel than it was originally set up on. So the bootloader was indicating that root should be at hda1 but in fact it was at hdc1.

Moving the HDD to the correct IDE channel (channel 1) fixed it.

I have a motherboard that only has 1 IDE connector. I thought it was strange but I have the HDD and the CDROm both on the same IDE. I play around with the jumpers on the hard drive and see what happens.

i get the kernel panic: attempted to kiil init" messege when i boot from cd (i want to install kubuntu.. i haven't linux yet).

What can I do??

on Redhat Linux AS 4 this message appear

hdd: no disk in drive
/bin/sh: no such file or direcotry

kernel panic not syncing attempting to kill init

Please guide

My motherboard only has 1 IDE channel. I added a PCI /IDE card and I'm still freezing at the Kernel Panic! prompt. How can I edit where Mandriva looks for boot files?

If the I/O controller was shorted then Windows XP would not boot neither. This seems to be isolated to Mandriva. Some system boot file is looking in the wrong places for the appropriate environment variables and paths.

Yeah I realized that later in this conversation. This error occurs for several diffrent reasons tho so its hard to pin down what exactly is causing it.


As for your error you should look at what messages you get before you get this one and see if you can figure out what is going on. From a guess I would say that the driver to load your pci controller is not being loaded before the system attempts to read the harddrive.

but thats only a guess.

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