Re: help for kernel panic

[Andrew Reid <reidac@bellatlantic.net>]

On Friday 21 August 2009 18:11:27 Alan Greenberger wrote:
> I have a system with Lenny installed from the KDE installer CD.  It was
> working fine for half a year.  Powering it on after being off for two
> weeks, it starts to load Lenny then dies with:
>  Failed to execute /init
>  can't open auto
>  Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

> iA linux-image-2.6.26-1-686
>  Version 2.6.26-13
> The md5sum of /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26-1-686 is
>  824cfba2eac12d0c09747c0bd3426e4e

  I think your checksum is OK, with a caveat -- it's the
right checksum for the advertised 2.6.26-13 version of that
package, which is distinct from 2.6.26-13lenny2, the latter
being the most recent 2.6.26-1 kernel for Debian lenny, which
in turn is not the most 2.6.26 kernel, there is a 2.6.26-2
out.

  I checksummed it by pulling the file out of 
/var/cache/apt/archives, manually unpacking it in a working
directory, and running md5sum on the resulting $DIR/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26-1
file.

  So, you're apparently behind on kernel updates, but your
kernel does not seem to be corrupt.

  That would seem to narrow it down to a corrupt initramfs,
or, as you already suggested, motherboard hardware issues.

  I don't have a huge amount of experience with this, but 
I did once have a similar issue -- I had a server that wouldn't
fully boot, it would just hang, always in different places in
the boot sequence.  But, it could boot to single-user mode, 
and if you then started all the /etc/init.d services manually, 
it would run fine for months at a time.

  I never did figure that one out, I eventually got rid of 
the machine.

				-- A.
-- 
Andrew Reid / reidac@bellatlantic.net