I am still fairly new to linux machines yet I have minor trials with them. I tried installing Mandriva free 2007 on sons machine. As it was installing, power failed for a minute. Now when I try to boot up, does not read the cdrom or floppy. It attempts to read each of them but never seems to run through, instead it goes to a screen to choose linux or failsafe with a counter on it. Either way I choose, it runs through opening Mandriva then pops up kernel panic: can not kill init and locks up right there. Please, does anyone have any suggestions? On my fathers machine I have installed debian and am bout to put limewire on thre for him and everything is working great thus far. That 433mhz pc is running super fast, as I well expected it to. The machine I am working on for son, it is a 633 mhz emachine with 128mb ram and a 20gb hdd. I have already checked the bios and made sure it was set to boot cdrom, removable device, hdd and sill to no results. I would greatly appriciate any help possible.

I found someone in another post with same problem. Someone says may have shorted the controller out and I am wandering how to tell if it did or not and how to fix it cheap as possible, free if possible as I make less then 17,000 a year, have family to support, tons of bills.

Ok, no one has thought of much of anything to assist me and so I am thinking maybe if I gave more detailed info, someone might have an idea.


600MHz Emachine

Intel proccessor

etower600is

that is what I am working on. The exact error message that appears is as follows.


creating root device
Trying to resume from /dev/hda5
No suspend signature on swap, not resuming.
echo: cannot open /proc/suspend2/do_resume for write:2
Mounting root filesystem /dev/root
VPS: Can't find ext3 filesystem on dev hda1.
mount: error 22 mounting ext3 flags defaults
Well, retrying without the option flags
VPS: Can't find ext3 filesystem on dev hda1.
mount: error 22 mounting ext3 flags defaults
Well, retrying without the option flags
VPS: Can't find ext3 filesystem on dev hda1.
mount: error 22 mounting ext3
switching to new root
ERROR opening /dev/console!!!!: 2
unmounting old /proc
unmounting old /sys
switchroot: mount failed: 22
initrd finished
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!



I hope this will clue someone to help me. Maybe it will spark an idea of what I might be able to do to fix it. When it tries booting, it will come to a blue screen with a dialog box and give me the option to boot linux or failsafe. I get stuck at the same spot no matter which I choose. I can get to a boot prompt by pressing Ctrl and Esc at the same time while it is showing the boot choice. One major thing I have bout Mandriva free 2007, I switched to linux to get away from M$ BLUE screen of death and here I am stuck at it on linux now. Pls help me get rid of the BLUE DEATH! I have directed a few new ppl to try this site for thier needs on learning linux as well. I hope one day M$ will be the minority where operating systems are concerned.

The error you posted (post 3) means that your root partition (which was partitioned as ext3) cannot be found. This could be due to several reasons e.g. the booloader entry is incorrect (which I doubt) or that your filesystem probably got damaged when you had a power cut. If it was a fresh install, I suggest you just reinstall. If you have any important stuff on the system, download a live cd such as gparted or system rescue cd and run tools such as fsck to repair your filesystem.

sorry if any of my post have come off as kind of rude, it is nothing towards anyone on here. I am just so beyond frustrated at that computer that it is beyond belief. If I could at least get it to boot from cdrom of floppy or even get to a text prompt other then the boot prompt when I click ctrl + esc. When I get to that boot prompt, it is text but has a listing of linux or failsafe and those are only two options I can type any wit any results. Everything else I attempt to type in gives the message "press [TAB] to see the list"....again, thank you so very much for any help anyone of you can give me.

I don't believe that any of your posts appear to be rude. It is likely that you did not see responses very quickly because people come here on a volunteer basis so there may not be many people looking at problems at any given moment. Also, people will read a post but if they don't have anything helpful to say then they don't respond.

Your first post said that you are trying to install Mandriva on a machine with 128 MB RAM. That is not very much RAM for most distributions of Linux. Some Linux distributions are made specifically for machines with this amount of memory or even less memory but most distributions state that you need to have at least 256 MB RAM to run their particular distribution of Linux. There are various reasons for this which I won't list here. So it is possible that you just don't have enough memory for Mandriva to start properly. Mandriva may be giving you an error message that is not completely accurate.

Any kernel panic is due to the kernel detecting a situation which it cannot handle. This can be caused by any number of things. redazz's suggestions appear to be the best course of action for your next step. As redazz said, the particular error messages that you posted are due to the kernel being unable to find the file system type that it expected to find. This can be caused by a damaged file structure on disk which makes the file system unreadable by the kernel or it can be caused by telling the kernel that the boot disk has one type of file system when it actually has a different type of file system. As redazz suggested it is a good idea to simply reinstall the operating system if that is possible. If it is not possible then you may have a hardware problem. Your last post suggests that this may be the case. You state that the computer will not boot from either cdrom or from a floppy disk. If the cdrom drive and/or the floppy drive have bootable media in them and if the CMOS BIOS is set to boot from these devices then it appears that your computer may have hardware problems.

As mentioned by stress_junkie, your posts were not rude or offensive at all. Its just that the issues you posted can be quite complex to diagnose and fix, so maybe the people who looked at your thread, felt that they could not help with your particular problem. Its nothing against you, so don't worry.

I think stress_junkie maybe onto something. Check that the floppy and cdrom devices are set to boot before the hard drive in the BIOS settings and then reinstall Mandriva.

I thank you two for you help. I have made sure the cdrom was set to first boot and the floppy to second boot and still it did not boot. I got to messing with the cables going to the HD and cdrom attempting to see if it would boot from the cd at all with a live version I disconnected the HD and the cdrom did not innitiate. Any suggestions of where I can find a diagram to correcting the cables in case I put them in wrong spots? I also messed with the jumpers on the cdrom and HD, lol ooppss. I am not not anywhere as good at computers as I should be with how long I have messed with computers in my life time. I am thinking of putting debian on the computer if I can ever get it to boot right. I have the netinstall iso burned to a cd... I hope someone may have a suggestion for me. Thank you in advance.

I apologize for bugging you all about this problem for so long. Good news tho, I was able to get it up and running through some advice on here. I unhooked everything except the CDROM and put Linux-xp in. Now I am having other problems figuring out how to get conqueronline and eudemons running on it for my son. I realize it uses WINE but I am a newb and have never used WINE before. I am going to post this in forums as a software problem to see if anyone can help me.....



THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH FOR THE HELP!