I am posting this on behalf of my friend, we are having a mini "installfest", and he is trying to compile 2.6.8 on Redhat 9 Shrike. He has 2.4.20.8 installed, and after getting 2.6.8 compiled, he gets a strange message when booting into the 2.6.8 install.

Kernel Panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.


Any ideas what the heck it wants us to do?

The problem is that it can't find your /sbin/init file, so although the kernel is loaded it can't actually spawn any processes.

The normal cause of this error is that the /sbin directory is not mounted, usually caused by forgetting to compile in drivers for the / filesystem. (Note that your root filesystem drivers must be compiled in, not as modules, as you can't load a module file to drive a filesystem if the file is on that filesystem).

You could try passing the option init=/sbin/init, but I doubt that that would work as it's likely to be the default if you had a working system on that box perviously.

Try booting into your old kernel ie. 2.4.20-8 [That should work].

cd to the 2.6 kernel directory tree.....compile ur kernel with ext3 or 2 as built-in.....finish the process.May be it works.

Sometimes problems arise also due to :
cramfs and other pseudo-filesystem options not being properly configured in the kernel.