RH9.0 newinstall; kernel panic no init found
 

Hi,

I installed RH9.0 on a new HDD (cable select as secondary drive on Primary IDE) in new Dell dimension 2400, with XP Home.

Install went fine, but when it rebooted for the first time, screen said GRUB and hung. Alt-ctl-del worked, same thing again.

Tried to re-boot from boot floppy; got tons of stuff scrolling off screen and then kernel panic, no init found, try passing init= to kernel
Alt-ctl-del does not work; have to hit on-off power button.

Tried after boot: prompt the following, without success (same error):
linux init=/sbin
linux init=/sbin/init
linux root=/dev/hdb

Seems like it's going to hda where (hopefully) XP still lives, instead of hdb where (I hope) I installed linux.

Suggestions?

Dave

I would try to boot with the Installation CD 1, and entering the command : linux rescue.

It should find your partitions and mount them in the /mnt/sysimage.

anyways, once you booted up correctly (assuming your partitions has been found)

Verify the output of the file (it would be nice if you can actually post it here) of the boot.log file located in /mnt/sysimage/var/log/boot.log.


if none of these works, i would recompile the kernel...

Ok, did linux rescue and got in; mounted in mnt/sysimage.
did chroot /mnt/sysimage

no boot.log found in suggested location (above).
got warning EXT2-fs warning checktime reached, running e2fsck is recommended.
tried dumpe2fs on /dev/hdb1, 2 and 3; 1 and 2 ok; 3 failed.
hdb3 is where the swap is located.

When I try to boot normally (without emergency floppy) I get
a black screen with GRUB and then it hangs.

Maybe ther is a quicker way to do this but, i dont know, i had the same problem and what i did was rRecompile the kernel..

if you dont know how to recompile the kernel here's how
assuming you have the 2.4.20 kernel

Go in your kenrel directory source /usr/src/linux-2.4.20
type the following in the shell:
make xconfig
when the gui pops up, click on Load from file and type .config
save and exit.
now you compile..
in the shell type:
make clean
make dep
make clean
make bzImage
make clean
make modules
make modules_install
make install
make clean

The process should take from 30 to 60 minutes, depending the speed of your cpu.
I have a P4 1.5Ghz and it took me 35 minutes.
It worked for me, i assume it should work for you.

I did mkbootdisk --device /dev/fd0/ 2.4.20-8 and used this floppy to boot; now I'm into graphical Linux just fine, but still can't get GRUB to work - I want a dual boot system...

I Think that Grub works, the problem is that it cannot find the initrd image in the /boot partition. This file is generated by the kernel whrn you install Linux.

Maybe you can try to reinstall grub, but i dont know if its gonna work because the problem seems to be the initrd file.

I had that problem i recompiled the kernel...

but maybe somebody have a quicker way to fix the problem?

To re-install grub, read the document tation here: http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/