very BIG error while booting up

[vhg119]

Unreal Tournament caused a total system freeze which required me to press the reset button. When it restarted, i forgot to force filesystem check (i'm using ext3 on all my filesystems). I correctly shut down the computer afterwards and on the next bootup it refused to startup properly.

while boot-up.. after the part when it frees some kernel memory, the bootup stops with a message that tells me
"kernel panic. init not found"

what can i do?

[recluse.]

Well I've had kernel panics before caused by the kernel not being able to find the root partition, those were tricky to solve.

But you have something a little different. How does linux boot? off the mbr or off a floppy?

[vhg119]

off the mbr

[error27]

To me it kinda sounda like some kind of hard disk corruption.

It would really help you right now if you had a rescue disk but I guess you probably don't.

Download one off the net and see if that works.

[vhg119]

i have the redhat cd. i tried it in rescue mode.
i could not mount any of the ext3 partitions. i couldnt run fsck-ext3 on it neither. i kept saying something about invalid device. i tried pointing it to the block where my partitions are but that didnt work.
when i try to start the comp it gives me an error 22, ext3 error right before it was suppose to start init. then it stops and tells me that kernel panic, no init found.

i hope i dont have to reinstall.

that was my 3rd time this month.

[recluse.]

With the Redhat cd that you're trying rescue with,is it the cd you installed with? I ask because the kernel it's booting from doesn't support ext3. Maybe a search on freshmeat.net would give you a boot disk with such support.

[slapNUT]

When you geet to the LILO boot: prompt type linux single

If you have a graphical LILO prompt you will need to press <Esc> to get to the text prompt.

[error27]

I'm fairly sure you can switch back to ext2 from ext3.

Also could you post the exact commands you are typing and error messages for when it says device not found.