Click to See Complete Forum and Search --> : Kernel panic!
Flamedance
02-08-2002, 06:06 AM
Fancied myself a linux pro and fooled around w/ /etc/inittab. Now, I trashed my system big time!
The exact error goes something like :
Warning : Unable to start initial console
Kernel panic! No init found. Try passing init= to kernel
It sounds pretty scary, but if there's a way around this short of a reinstallation?
furrycat
02-10-2002, 09:02 PM
Boot by entering "linux init=/bin/bash" at the LILO prompt or with a boot disk. Mount your installation CD. Find the package containing /etc/inittab. Extract. Before rebooting, remount your filesystems read-only: "mount -o remount,ro /" etc
Flamedance
02-11-2002, 11:44 AM
Thanx but still no nothing.
I booted from a floppy, inserted the the Linux CD and let it take over, only to be dropped to an installation process.
I chose 'upgrade', in case I'd be able to select the RPM containing /etc/inittab but the thing said my fs hadn't been unmounted properly. Well, imo, I need to at least ,once, boot up and shutdown my system cleanly .
But surely that wouldn't be possible since the boot up process had stopped at the above error message.
Booting into linux rescue hadn't helped either...
Well I'm at a loss, perhaps I need to reinstall after all....
furrycat
02-12-2002, 11:41 PM
Use a Slackware boot disk.
ricku
02-13-2002, 12:21 AM
Originally posted by Flamedance:
Thanx but still no nothing.
I booted from a floppy, inserted the the Linux CD and let it take over, only to be dropped to an installation process.
Well I'm at a loss, perhaps I need to reinstall after all....
If this be RedHat, you have to dance. Start from rescue floppy with CD in, at boot: type 'linux rescue'... you'll get a read only fs with utils- except /mnt is a ramdisk! mkdir /mnt/foo and mount /hda6 or whatever your main partition used to be read&write as /mnt/foo, then edit, fsck as needed.
Flamedance
02-13-2002, 04:41 AM
I tried linux rescue after booting off a floppy, w/ the CD inserted, mounted my root fs (/dev/hda9) under /mnt/rhl and ran fsck /mnt/rhl.
An error message kinda 'not a valid or corrupt superblock' was returned.
It said to to try an alternative s/block to run e2fsck -b <device>. I could certainly say, this was not my game... http://discussions.linuxplanet.com/smile.gif
Btw, I'm using Red Hat 7.1.