I had a RHEL 4 system running, but one day I came into work to find it not booting. A reboot gave me a Kernel panic:

--------
Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while...
/dev/hde: open failed: Read-only file system
Attempt to close device '/dev/hde' which is not open.
Found volume group "VolGroup00" using metadata type lvm2
6 logical volume(s) in volume group "VolGroup00" now active
ext3: No Journal on filesystem on dm-0
mount: error 22 mounting ext3
mount: error 2 mounting none
switchroot: mount failed: 22
umount /initrd/dev failed: 2
Kernel panic - not sysncing: Attempted to kill init!
--------

I tired booting for the install CD to do a rescue. It told me I had no drives installed, so I ran -> linux all-generic-ide noapic nolapic rescue

This gets me further, and finds my hard drive. But when it attempts to find my Linux installation and mount it, it says I don't have any Linux partitions, so it gives me the shell.

In the shell, I run fdisk -l and it lists my partitions:

Disk /dev/hde: 250.0 GB, 250000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 20294 cylinders
Units: cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hde1 1 8 64228+ de Dell Utility
/dev/hde2 9 531 4200997+ 8e Linux LVM
/dev/hde3 * 532 556 200812+ 83 Linux
/dev/hde4 557 30394 239673735 5 Extended
/dev/hde5 557 30394 239673735+ 8e Linux LVM


If I try to do a fsck on any, it tells me that /etc/fstab is missing, so if I just do a touch on that file to create a blank one, I run fsck on /dev/hde3 and get:

fsck 1.35 (28-Feb-2004)
WARNING: Your /etc/fstab does not contain the fsck passno
field. I will kludge around things for you, but you
should fix your /etc/fstab file as soon as you can.

e2fsck 1.35 (28-Feb-2004)
/boot: clean, 76/50400 files, 47536/200812 blocks

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Any ideas on my next step? I'd love to save it with a rescue of some kind instead reinstall. I have and Informix database on it, and to reinstall that I would have to rebuy the key!!

Thanks,

Ed

That seems straightforward enough. Is it finding the / filesystem? I'm taking it dm-0 is a raid device?

You'd really need to post /etc/fstab and explain what you're doing. That error usually comes after the kernel has loaded and / cannot be mounted.

It is not a raid device and as I stated, there is no /etc/fstab so I have none to post.

RHEL 4 is VERY old. I'm surprised you're still using it. Update asap once you're sorted.
You appear to have a faulty /dev/hde, and I wonder what's happened to hda - hdd. I gather that system must be ide, not sata. As a first move, I would suspect hardware. Most motherboards only support hda - hdd. How is hde connected? What can you see that I can't? Can you put a known good disk on IDE0 that will boot, with no other drive related hardware, and see if it boots then? Once you get running, you can check stuff and sort yourself out. That failing, an install cd like slackware boots just to a console. You can log in as root, and have e2fsck etc available.

Your kernel options usually include an option root=<some_disk_partition>. Where does the system think / is? Where actually is it? The 2 are probably different.

For the record, as we're into antiquity here, give us m/c specs, kernel version etc.