Did the usual up2date thing and then rebooted. System now stops with message:

exec of init (/sbin/init) failed!!! : 2
umount /initrd/dev failed: 2
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

Don't know where to start. Really need step by step as I am not a hacker.

Thanks for help.

At the grub boot screen did you try to load your previous kernel? When the menu
shows, hit any key and the boot sequence freezes allowing you to choose a previous kernel version.

nz

There's about four previous kernels and I've tried all of them with the same results. I am looking at the /var/log/messages file but I don't know what to look for. I can email it to anyone who might want to decipher it.

I know this is an old thread, but I'm posting here because this page was the first hit on Google when I started looking for a solution to the same problem myself:

Trying to install Ubuntu Feisty x64, I got this same error. Tried Debian Etch too, both of them known good install DVDs, with no joy. Same error. It turns out the problem is bad RAM. Windows limped along (I wondered why it had been so slow and flaky) on this machine, but it seems Linux (or at least the installer) is more sensitive to bad memory.

Boot into the Ubuntu installer - or any other Live distro installer - and choose memtest86. Most likely it will start showing failures very quickly. Then it's just a case of the settling down to the long task of trying the system with each stick of RAM in turn removed. Be careful to use an anti-static wrist strap when handing the RAM.

Good luck!

Sorry, my english is very bad.

I had same problem.

I update BIOS and Linux work OK.

Sorry, my english is very bad.

I had same problem.

I update BIOS and Linux work OK.
(My motherboard is MSI Neo2 platinum 915G/P)

I was getting this error ("Kernel panic - not syncing") when I was duplicating a 40GB h/d (dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=11182080).

In my case the cause was a bad RAM stick.

I can also testify it is a bad memory module, seemingly.
Since, I do not have the error with all other memory.
Very strange indeed, since I believe it is good. It seems that the kernel itself is not liking it.

Can we make this a sticky topic? That's the 10-kazillionth time I've seen this. Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init! <smiley of head smashing against wall repeatedly>

I had no problem running System Rescue CD, but a custom distribution of Linux would give me the kernel panic error. Thanks to this thread I knew it had to be a ram problem. I just reset my memory settings in the bios, all to defaults, and disabled any caching of video and bios to ram. It started right up.

Yes, this should be a "sticky topic."

The most-important thing to realize about this message is... what it is actually saying. (It's all "geek speak," so bear with me.)

(0) A "kernel panic" happens when the kernel realizes that it is hopeless to continue. (If that happened to you, well, "you'd panic too.")

(1) When Linux starts, it automagically creates one process. That's "process #1," and its name is init. I don't need to explain here all of the things that init (and "init" alone...) does: the important thing to know is, "init" is not allowed to die.

(1a) If "init" does die, for whatever reason, the message given is deceptive: it says that someone "attempted to kill 'init,'" when the actual truth is just that "'init' died."

(2) The computer does a lot of disk-I/O activity "in the background." So, there's a tiny amount of time that passes between a request to write something to the disk, and the point in time when that disk-write is physically complete. Bottom line is... "not syncing" is good, and "syncing" means that you just scribbled your disk. Don't ask me why.

(3) The real problem that you need to actually be concerned about is described in the messages that precede this one. Not "this one!"

Yep... "let it be 'sticky.'"

I downloaded linux-2.6.27.8 fm kernel.org and did the make menuconfig (took defaults there), make, make modules, make modules_install, make install. After reboot, got the same kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init! message. I am able to boot with my old kernel without problems so hw might not an issue for me. The error I get before that is:
VolGroup00 using metadata type LVM2
/dev/hdcpen failed: no medium found

I'm having the same issue with the new kernel. I'm going to roll back to 2.6.26.8, see if that helps.

If you actually saw a reference to /dev/hd?, you may need to update your /etc/fstab: the newer kernels often use the "combined Serial/Parallel device driver" which names hard drives as /dev/sd? rather than /dev/hd?.

A better choice in /etc/fstab is to use the LABEL= or UUID= form to identify partitions. (The values to put after the "=" can be found by a ls -l /dev/disk/by-label or ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid. (An added advantage of using the LABEL= or UUID= form is that your system doesn't "barf" when you play with your drive cables, which you sometimes need to do when a cable fails or you add a new drive od other device.)

Often when the OS will panic, for whatever reason. It appears to start to "kill" processes. What processes it kills may be random (even some system) hence the reasoning behind the fact that some of these issues seem unrelated and leads a little to the illusive-ness of the issue that caused problems for users , in this thread and others.
As I stated previously, my issue was bad hardware which was a drive in my case. My problem hasn't been experienced since a replacement 9 months or so now.

I believe it to be somewhat misleading when someone will say that they have defined the definitive problem and want then to 'retire' the topic. Clearly the issue still affects people out there...