Red hat 9.0 boot problem
 

I'm loving, well it least I was loving, my new install of Redhat 9.0 on an old Gateway Athlon 800 machine. After a while of not being able to install RH7 or 8 on this machine (Something to do with the BIOS not being liked and the fact it had old IDE controller on it, or somethjing.. That's not the point) I fired up RH9 and it worked first time, that is when I booted off the bootdisk (Created during install)

To cut a long story short, I'm dual booting with Win2003 Server, when I try and boot, from the hard drive with Windows on it (Set up so that it'll boot from the other hard drive, Windows boot menu configuration) I get "GRUB" at the top of the screen with a continuous PC Speaker Beeps.. The same thing happened with LILO.. I've read up on the net about these problems and they seem pretty scattered in their descriptions (Where they relate to someone trying to network boot, or boot with an older version of Redhat and don't seem to apply in my situation.)

On the other hand when I actually boot off the linux drive, it goes straight to GRUB boot menu (A good thing), I load the root drive, the kernel and the initrd file and then give the boot command... It gets at least 80% (An estimate) of the way through the boot process...
Then I get...

Kernel panic. No init found, try passing init = option to kernel

To get to this point:
GRUB BOOT MENU........ -->
root (hd0,0) (Right, finds ext2fs, partnumber xxxxx containing /boot)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20-8
initrd /initrd-2.4.20-8.img
boot

I've also tried adding "root=/ and init=/sbin/init" to the kernel line, but the same thing happens every time....

I don't have the boot floppy to correctly boot into it any more (Thanks to a corrupt floppy drive, which wiped disk and blew up a power supply)...

Can anybody see a solution to this problem?
The thing I really want to do (Booting from CD -- linux rescue)
I think is to wipe the mbr of the second disk, the linux disk and set it up with GRUB again.. Everything I try unfortunately does not seem to work...

Can anyone shed any light on this?

Also, any idea on how to make a bootable disk ones the HDD is mounted through "linux rescue"

kwiksand

P.S I've done much searching on the net and through forums, but unfortunately with no REAL help yet, just lots of ways of getting round the problem, none of which have helped me as yet...

Any help'd be appreciated, After this I'll just install Redhat again, which would be a shame because I had it set up nicely!

I would agree - use Redhat's "linux recuse" mode. Did you have a problem doing this?

The command you probably need to run is:
grub-install /dev/hda

(assuming you want to put the grub bootloader on the MBR of hda)

I have had this before. It really can be all sorts of things. However, I bet that there are errors going on before it even gets to this hang point. Can you check it out?

Hi kwiksand

I was also getting this proble. The funniest par is when i connected my other hard disk as secondary master or slave i get this same error.
"kernel panic no init found " iam confussed

I have yet to see a linux kernel panic while the system is running(actually,i have seen it only on boot time).

"Kernel Panic: init not found" is (ofcourse)a previously

listed error and is because of something that happened to the kernel that it couldn't handle, whether it was an access to an

invalid memory location or the inability to find the initialization files it requires.

try mandrake, easy boot system, and works everytime ;)

.....though not as good as redhat!!