kernel panic: No init found
 

i am using redhat advaced server 2.1.while booting my server i am getting error message"kernel panic: No init found. try passing init = option to kernel ".pl give me solution to restore my server.

What did you change just before you rebooted? This looks like the kind of error you get when grub/lilo has "misplaced" your boot sector, but we would need to know what happened to get you into this pickle.

BTW, this pickle is often recoverable.

one of the hot swappable hard disks gone faulty.

Can you boot from a live CD and examine the current filesystem? What you want to do is find out if the drives are still being "seen" the way they once were.

Your '/dev/sdb' might now look like '/dev/sda', if you follow my drift.

Ultimately, your bootloader is probably not pointing to your linux installation.

First things first...boot from live CD, mount your old / file system, examine /etc/fstab and see what it expects as a device...i.e.) sdb, hdb, etc. Post the result for us : )

How is that supposed to help us???? You will need to give more detail on your system configuration.

No--that would cause it not to find the kernel. It is the highlighted entry below that tells the kernel where to find init:

<<excerpt from /boot/grub/menu.lst>>
title Slack_13
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda5 ro

Also, lilo or grub don't look for the "boot sector"---they look for the partition containing /boot. They might howeever be ON the boot sector.

Actually, the key to what's happening *IS* in the loss of narenderiete's swappable drive, IMO. If his drive order is messed up, then narenderiete will get the message "kernel panic: No init found", meaning the boot loader could not continue with kernel initialization and has thrown this error to STDOUT and stopped.

I might be wrong, but I think his /boot partition is being recognized as a different disk, now.