kernel panic all of a sudden on FC2

vrooje · 06-02-2006, 11:22 PM

I shut my laptop down this afternoon normally, running the "latest" kernel of FC2.

Tonight, when I booted up (grub boot), I got the following message:

Code:

Kernel Panic - not syncing: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.

Besides Windows, I can boot to three different FC2 kernels, and they're all corrupted in this way.

I checked my boot commands, and there is an initrd line in all three versions... same as this morning, when everything was just peachy.

Windows is working fine; I'm typing from WinXP.

What can I do to get into Linux at all, so that I can either fix this, or back up necessary stuff before upgrading to a new version?

PTrenholme · 06-03-2006, 09:17 AM

It sounds like you may have had a (hopefully, soft) HD crash in your /boot partition.

Try booting from the rescue CD and running fsck on that partition -- or on all your Linux partitions (except, of course, any logical volume partitions).

Aside (not relevant to you problem): FC2 has been unsupported for some time now. Have you considered upgrading to FC4 or FC5? (Of course, your laptop may have limited resources, and FC5 is fairly resource intensive. But there are other distributions available for systems with limited resources. Note, however, that the newer 2.6.16 kernels contains a lot of "laptop support" improvements, so an upgrade to a distribution using a 2.6.16 kernel might "improve" your situation.)

Edit: Oh, if you don't have the rescue CD handy, "Google" linux rescue. There are several bootable iso rescue disk images available for download, and you can use almost any one of them to run fsck (or e2fsck) on your partition.

vrooje · 06-03-2006, 01:07 PM

Okay, I'll use the rescue disk... but just to make sure, since I've never done this before...

what is a logical volume partition compared to a partition that it's safe to run fsck on? I would, um, prefer not to screw up my hard drive due to ignorance.

If it helps, here's my partition table:

Code:

          Boot  Start     End         Blocks       ID    System
/dev/hdc1         1          5         40131       de    Dell Utility
/dev/hdc2   *     6       2380      18434587+       7    HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hdc3      6839       7295       3670852+      db    CP/M/CTOS/...
/dev/hdc4      2301       6838      36451485        f    W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hdc5      2301       2313        104391       83    Linux
/dev/hdc6      2314       6584      34306776       83    Linux
/dev/hdc7      6585       6838       2040223+      82    Linux Swap

vrooje · 06-05-2006, 12:27 AM

Update:

I booted a rescue disk and tried fsck on /dev/hdc5, which is my /boot partition.

The result:

Code:

/boot: Clean, 54/26104 files, 22894/104388 blocks

/dev/hd6 came back clean too.

However... still not booting. I've tried this with two different rescue disks, because on the first rescue disk (the FC2 install disk), I kept getting an error message when trying to chroot /mnt/sysimage :

Code:

Cannot execute /bin/sh: No such file or directory

I can see everything in the /boot and / partitions once I've mounted them, and it all looks normal to me.

I've looked in /var/log and nothing is sticking out to me as odd.

Any ideas? Could this be a physically corrupted drive?

I've backed up the necessary files, so at this point I'm willing to upgrade to a new distro, but if it's a bad drive sector or something, I can call in my Dell warranty first...

PTrenholme · 06-05-2006, 09:49 AM

Well, one last thought: Try the fsck again using the "force" option (i.e., fssk -f /dev/hdc5)

And, if that doesn't "fix" it, see if you can make a GRUB boot floppy from the rescue boot. ("floppy" so you don't impact your working boot to XP.) It may be that your initial RAM disk image was somehow clobbered, and (if the floppy boot disk works) you could replace the on on hdc5 with the new one from the floppy.

Oh, the instructions for creating a GRUB boot floppy can be found in info grub, which you should be able to access after you do the chroot from the rescue disk, or here's a quick "walk through:"

1) Boot the rescue CD. (Do not do the chroot - you want to cp (see below) the stage1 and stage2 files from the CD.)
2) Place a blank floppy in your floppy drive
3) Do the following:

Code:

# mount # To see if the floppy was automatically mounted
# umount /media/floppy # If the floppy was mounted
# mke2fs /dev/fd0 # You could use mkfs.msdos if you want to edit the boot disk using XP
# mount /media/floppy
# mkdir /media/floppy/boot
# mkdir /media/floppy/boot/grub
# cp /boot/grub/stage1 /media/floppy/boot/grub/stage1
# cp /boot/grub/stage2 /media/floppy/boot/grub/stage2
# grub
# grub> root (fd0)
# grub> setup (fd0)
# grub> quit

FC5 has a mkbootdisk command for this, but I don't believe its available in older Fedora releases.

vrooje · 06-14-2006, 02:09 PM

fsck using the force command did come up with errors, but it couldn't fix them...

...by turning on some verbose options at startup and replacing files as-needed, we did get the thing to boot. From there I tried updating, but things were apparently so badly corrupted that the only thing that worked was wiping and installing a new distribution (newish -- FC3, which is supported by my department).

Apparently the crash that caused this took place at the beginning of May.

So, juuust a bit of a hassle, but at least I backed everything up before wiping.

Thanks for the help!