Kernel Panic: How To Fix
 

The hardware specifications of my computer are:
AMD Athlon 64 3200+
DFI Lanparty nF4 Ultra-D
XFX [nVidia] GeForce 6600GT
LSI Logic Ultra320 PCI-X Controller
Maxtor 80GB SATA150 HDD
Seagate Cheetah Ultra320 36.6GB HDD
NEC DVD DL DF Burner
Floppy Drive

http://tinypic.com/fvd1c8.jpg
http://tinypic.com/fvd18x.jpg
http://tinypic.com/fvd18x.jpg

Above, I've posted links to images of my monitor during the boot. They show the same thing, but some may be more legible than others, that is your preference.

I'm switching distros as Gentoo is not the one for me. So, I decided to try Sarge.

Problem [more is shown in pix]
[cod]Attached scsi disk sdb at scsi4, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
pivot_root: No such file or directory
/sbin/init: 432: cannot open dev/console: No such file or directory
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init![/code]

What is causing this? How can I fix it?

Hi Megsy,

I'm no expert. However, I've seen a similar message fairly recently. This is the kind of message I got when I tried to boot into a system that didn't have the booting information available.

Specifically, I saw it after I had installed Debian but chose not to install a bootloader into the MBR (master boot record). I didn't want to overwrite my NT bootloader (Windows) and decided I would try to boot using the installation disc. When I tried it, it gave me a very similar message. (That is, "Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!")

It would help if you could give us some more information on what led up to this. Have you successfully installed Sarge? Did you choose to install GRUB as bootloader? On which disk are you installing what partitions? (I see you have 2 SCSI disks running.)

Hi,

probably a corrupted initrd...

Oliv'

This is probably not at all relevant, but when I had a similar message (pivot_root: No such file or directory, and Kernel Panic: Attempted to kill init!), it was because of this line in my menu.lst:

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.14 root=/dev/hdb1 ro

Which was fixed after I changed hdb1 to hda1. It happened after copying my partition to a different disk and tried to boot from that. Apparently hdb1 worked for the old drive, but was incorrect for the new one.

I see many have this issue.
Kernel panic after kernel update --> 2.6.14.2, from kernel org.

I read about the same or similar problem.
a fix seems to be to use:

here is a link to some info i think might be relevant.

heres the link: http://www.howtoforge.com/howto_linu...compile_debian


I havent fixed this on my box yet, so I'm not to sure if this is the fix for the same problem : )

* Bug fix: "kernel-package creates packages depending on
linux-initramfs-tools, should use linux-initramfs-tool", thanks to
Thomas Luzat. (Closes: #336724)
* Bug fix: "/usr/share/doc/kernel-package seems to contain broken
symlinks", thanks to Thomas Luzat (Closes: #336744)