Kernel panic: No init found.

[Reid Mumford <reid@pha.jhu.edu>]

I have a problem that has brought my laptop down.

I recently installed KDE 3.1 and everything seemed to be working pretty
well.  I was messing around with the file browser in kde and suddenly
started to get some weird error messages.  I tried to shutdown and it
complained that shutdown was "not executable".  I finally had to
power-cycle the machine.

When i booted the next time it looked like it was trying to access some
memory on the disk that was outside the physical range of the disk...
complained like crazy and then hung.

I was able to boot with a debian rescue cd, mount my root filesystem and
clean things up with fsck.

when i tried to boot after that, it looks like it is able to mount the
root fs but it complains about not being able to find init.  Out of
desperation, i tried booting the rescue cd with the root= kernel argument
to point to my root partition, that is:

linux root=/dev/hda2

this results in the following error messages on boot:

EXT2-fs warning: checktime reached, running e2fsck is recommended
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem).
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
change_root: old root has d_count=1
Trying to unmount old root ... okay
Freeing unused kernel memory: 156k freed
Kernel panic: No init found.  Try passing init= option to kernel

this is basically the same thing that i get when i boot without the cd
too.

Any ideas on how to save this system without having to reinstall?

thanks

reid mumford