Greetings to all-
I have been on Zorin since I don't know, 12 or 13 or whatever, never a problem until 15 kept dropping internet connections, so then I upgraded to 17. Not really a coder or any kind of expert. Last week I loaded an update, then 3 days later restarted for the first time since the update, and the OS would not load. I got a fail message that was kernel panic cannot find the init. So I googled and browsed, found a couple of lines of code to put in the terminal to roll back update, ran it, no luck. I am running now off the 6.2 version that was the second one down in the advanced tab that has the recovery mode options. I t works fine, just wondering how to fix my boot up.I tried going into GRUB and changing the line from "quiet splash" to init=/init, and no luck. Just wondering if anyone else had trouble with that last update, and of course, if anyone has a fix? Saw some threads from '04, figure that's probly obsolete.

It seems like when you did the update the kernel was updated and you didn't make the initrd file to match the new kernel.

Or the initrd file was not put in the right spot.

There speaks a Slacker! Debian derivatives like Zorin usually make an initramfs (as they call it) automatically for a new kernel, or indeed whenever any of the software in the initramfs tree gets updated. I wish they paid me for all the time I've spent waiting for that to complete.
That's more likely. The OP hasn't told us if the computer boots with a UEFI. If it does, it might be necessary to copy the initramfs by hand from /boot over to the EFI system partition.

No offer of assistance/support unless you pay for the pro edition. Might go some way to explain why I've never looked at it.

Maybe try their social media links - better you than me.

Edit: forgot to mention, I would expect a distro with that heritage to fix things like that fairly quickly with the next update; maybe the EFI partition wasn't mounted properly, who knows.

I have no idea what Slackware is, and Zorin is an Ubuntu derivative. I will hold out for the next update. I started to buy the deluxe version, but it didnot really seem to offer anything I needed. Didn't think about support, never needed it. For the last 10 years I've always managed to just cut and paste command lines and make things work, but this one is just too out of the ordinary.

that's when things usually can go wrong, specially when doing an entire O/S upgrade. Assuming you have a backup of your data (you do have a backup, right?), in your case I think your best course of action would be to start from scratch and reinstall the whole thing, preferable on a blank new disk and mount the old one to recover whatever script or program you might want to recover. OR you can learn about creating the initrd mentioned in the error log and see what happens.

afaik all commands on this forum are given as an hints.

Was this a standard update when you were prompted by the OS there was an update available? You indicate this problem only showed up several days later as you had not used the computer since the update. Did the update complete without error? Did you observe the update and see no problem and then shut down?

What might those lines of code you entered that did not help have been? What site did you get the code from? Was it an Ubuntu/Debian site or the Zorin forums? Or did you not make note of it?

Sorry, that was an in-joke. Slackware is probably the oldest Linux distro still in use and it is very much hands-on. Hence the expectation that a user would make (or forget to make) his own initrd. I wouldn't have expected that to be necessary for anything in the Debian family.
and therefore a member of the wider Debian clan. Grandson of Debian so to speak. I think Wikipedia has somewhere a lovely family tree of all the Linux distros so you can see what forked from what.
Very wise. Ubuntu is based on Debian Unstable so bugs should be quickly fixed.
Support is worth paying for if you run commercial servers. For desktop users like us, the community should provide all that we need.
That sounds rather boring to me. Don't you think it would be interesting to find out what the commands mean?

btw welcome to the forum!

Slackware is the oldest Linux system still in use, Debian being 2nd. The link below provides more info if you are interested. That isn't going to help with your problem, just a comment in the earlier post which has now been explained to you.

http://www.slackware.com/info/

What might help would be if you do not enter random bits of code found on the internet to try to repair a problem as it will often make it worse. If you do something like that, do it only from a reliable, trusted site which explains what the commands will/should do and of course, make note of this information so that you have it to post for help when things go wrong.

Okay guys, you're right about the cut and paste I said it kind of casually. All I did was replace "quiet splash" in GRUB bootloader with init=/init.That was a recommendation I saw on a Zorin forum, which is actually what I thought this was. But it morphed somewhere along the way. The thing is, the OS 17 was working great, but I haven't loaded any of my backup documents because all that Grep stuff has to be reviewed and carefully set up. I like to know what the commands mean, but they are really hard to remember. I've been hit in the head too may times over the years I guess. Plus I don't so this every day, just got po'd when they stopped supporting Windows 6. Tried Mint, and it sucks. Zorin has been bery, bery good to me. Till now.That rollback the update code was also off a Zorin forum. And the update I was referring was just part of the automatic updates that comes from Zorin. The computer did show an error on the update, but it seemed to me that was it, just a failed update and on we go. Would this work?

sudo apt-get -f install

A guy on "ask Ubuntu" said that usually fixes broken updates.

I can't find the article about rolling back an update, there were several that were really long and involved and I now I'd proably screw that up, but this was just a couple of simple two word lines.

So anyway thanks for the history lesson, I'll just keep stumbling along. If Worse comes to worst, this won't be the first computer I have reduced to a smoking hulk.

That is the point at which my whiskers would have begun to twitch. Most Linux distros (other than Slackware) have complex internal update databases to ensure that everything being installed is mutually compatible. Most of the time, that works smoothly and it protects the user from various kinds of aggro. But the flip side is that there is more to go wrong. For that reason, I would never just ignore an error in an update, unless it was only at the download stage. Once apt has started actually installing stuff, you have entered a zone of vulnerability.

If this had been me, I would have:
1) Cut and pasted the actual error message into a file for future reference
2) Checked to see if apt itself told me to run a specific command to clear the problem (apt does that sometimes and it's a very useful feature)
3) If that didn't work, google the error message
4) Post the error message(s) in LQ. If you've found something online, post that too and ask if it would be safe to do it.
It might work or it might make things worse. When apt refuses to do something, it has a reason (not necessarily a good one!). Using the -f option to force an action could make things worse. Again, that's what the forum is for. There will be people here who have been in the same situation and can tell you if forcing it is safe and how to find out.

Often a post-update boot failure can be avoided at the Grub menu, by selecting to boot an older installed kernel from an advanced options submenu. It ought be the first thing to try when a freshly installed kernel panics, generally much less drastic than snapshot booting.

Thanks for all the helpful comments. As some had suggested, the next update came along and resolved all the issues. So I like Zorin again.

Ty for this discussion! You help me a lot too.