Re: help for kernel panic

[Alan Greenberger <alanjg@ptd.net>]

On 2009-08-22, Andrew Reid <reidac@bellatlantic.net> wrote:
> 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.

Thanks for confirming the md5sum and the suggestion.  It also fails boot
to level 1.  I used rescue to turn on /etc/default/bootlogd but nothing
gets logged to /var/log so I guess it doesn't get that far.  I would
have liked to know where it fails, since it does boot rescue CDs.  I am
giving up assuming it is the motherboard.