ok, so I'm getting "kernel panic - no init found", but I'm kinda sure it was my fault. The system was up and running and had been for quite some time. I was tinkering with some old source code and was doing it as root (bad). Anyway, I executed "make clean" and make tried to do some major deletion. The system stopped responding at that point. When I boot (grub) it loads the kernel up to init, of course, and then I get the above error. I am running Fedora Core 1. Booted into "linux rescue" and verified that I did not lose any data (that I can tell), the filesystem looks intact, but obviously there is something important missing. Any ideas where I can start patching things up? I looked at /boot, nothing missing there. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

Hi, and welcome to LQ!

Well ... the question is what old sourcecode you were
tinkering with, or whether the problem is just coincidental
in nature, and you somehow (in a different way) deleted
some system file ... I wouldn't think that some random package
would touch /etc or /boot in the process of a 'make clean'.


Cheers,
Tink

hmmm... you normally have something called "initrd.<version numbers>" in /boot - you sure it's there?

Also, can we have a close look at that makefile from where it says :clean?

And could this be in the programming or software section possibly?

Also, make sure /sbin/init still actually exists.