Ok so was testing out a little 2d game on wine just to see how wine worked...and the system locked up badly. I couldn't even change to a command line mode to issue a reboot command and so I hard restarted. As soon as I restart I get "Kernel panic - not syncing: attempted to kill init!". Alright...never faced a linux boot problem before so I have a lot of learning to do.

As I understand it that error message is a generic message telling you it's dead...and the real problem lies in the lines before it. Most of it makes sense to me and is god except the last line, but I'll parse at a bunch.

Loading jdb.ko module
Loading ext3.ko mdule
Mounting /proc filesystem
Mounting sysfs
Creating device files
Mounting tmpfs on devfsck on a mounted partition
Creating root device
Trying to resume from /dev/hda2
No suspend signature on swap, not resuming.
echo: cannot open /proc/suspend2/do_resume for write: 2
Mounting root filesystem /dev/root
kjournald starting. COmmit interval 5 seconds
EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
Switching to new root
unmounting old /proc
unmounting old /sys
/bin/sh: root=/dev/hda3: No such file or directory
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

Only problem line to me appears to be the /bin/sh: root=/dev/hda3: No such file or directory...but I don't really know what to do.

So from what I gather the problem occurs when attempting to load my /root. I figured a good first step would be to drop the Mandriva rescue CD in and take a look. Unfortunately this seemed to go nowhere, as nearly every command I know would result in a "command not found" error...I couldn't even do dir to figure out where I was. So I resort to booting Knoppix. I tried fsck on hda3 and found nothing wrong (though I'm not 100% sure how to use it since I'm very new to linux). I ran it as fsck.ext3 /dev/hda3 and it returned "clean".

I'm figuring that a cat /etc/fstab might help understand my system so from within knoppix:

/dev /hda3 / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/hdc3 /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/hdc1 /home ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/hbdb /mnt/cdrom auto unmaks=0022, users,iocharset=utf8,noauto,ro,exec 0 0
none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0022,exec 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/win_c ntfs umask=0022, nls=utf8,ro 0 0
/dev/hdc2 /mnt/win_c2 ntfs umask=0022, nls=utf8, ro 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda2 swap swap defaults 0 0

I would provide more in depth diagnostics...but I don't know where to begin. Any help would be appreciated.

If the first line of your /etc/fstab actually has the space after the /dev, that may be your problem. But I suspect that it's just a typo in you message.

When you booted your Mandiva rescue CD, did it give you the suggestion to chroot /mnt/sysimage or something similar? If it did, did you do that? (The chroot command should put you into a root shell in your /root directory, where all your commands should work.)

More than that, I can't help much. From your output, /dev/hda3 should be available. If you're using GRUB as your boot loader, you could try hitting ESC and going into command mode to verify that the device map is correct, and "/" is really on (hd0,2). (LILO probably has something similar, but I'm not familiar with LILO.)

yeah just a typo

it does not...it starts with a simple gui with a few options:

Re-Install bootloader
Restore Windows bootloader
Mount your partitions under /mnt
Console
Reboot
Doc

So it seems to me that I should be mounting them with the mount option, then going to console...when I do though the console is useless and provides no recommended chroot. I remember from the time I used fedora that it did promtp you with chroot /mnt/sysimage...I might try it and see if it works for mandriva.

It is GRUB I'm using so I'll give that a shot...but yeah that's why I'm confused everything looks like it should be working.

I just got in on the computer and everything appears even more in order now. Checked the GRUB options and everything looked perfect. I booted the rescue cd and figured out that if I mounted the partitions then went to console and typed chroot /mnt everything works.

I can't figure it out...I can navigate everything nothing seems broken. The root partition seems in perfect order and the rescue cd seems to have no issues. If anyone has any ideas, help.

Did you also check the device map?

Once you chroot, can you re-install GRUB? (The grub-install script is usually distributed with grub, so a simple grub-install /dev/hda or grub-install (hd0) should refresh your GRUB.)

That's a "long shot," but it should do no harm to try it.

Oh, again, once you do the chroot, do a ls / to see if you might have some "funny" files in /. As a general rule, the only things you should see in / are directories, and any actual files found there are (again, generally speaking) either boot flags (most often 0-byte files created by touch) or files that should really be somewhere else.

Also look into /var/lock/* to see if you might have some left-over lock files that are interfering with your access. (Any lock file with a time stamp prior to your current access time should be, in my opinion, suspect. If you find any, try removing them and rebooting. Again, this should do no harm, since no process, as far as I know, should remain locked across a reboot.)

<edit>
You know, the "lock file" thing may be where your problem is. That's because the locks are usually released during shutdown, and your problem started after a forced reboot, which bypassed the normal shutdown.

But maybe not: I think most distributions also remove any locks during the boot process to avoid such problems.
</edit>

Thanks for the attempts...unfortunatly everything seems normal. Grub insalled and said it was fine, nothing but directories in my root. There was one directory in my lock folder. I backed it up and then deleted the folder. Nothing fixed.

This is a fairly recent install only a couple weeks old.So I'm going to back up my /home, format my partitions, and take the windows way out of boot problems...Reinstall the OS. Unfortunatly with my limited linux expierence and unserstanding I just don't personally have the ability yet to fix problems...or even explain them well enough to recieve help most likely. In all reality most likely the problem would be found and fixed within a few min by someome expierenced if they actually interacted with the computer.