Re: help for kernel panic
Alan Greenberger wrote:
> 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.
hehe, why are you making this assumption?!
try passing init=/bin/sh to the kernel at boot time ( I wrote a basic 5step
howto get to the limited shell have a look in the list) you can start your
system and recreate the initramfs. This will solve your problem (I'm pretty
sure as I have seen this many times.)
The problem is I think when you install you have something like 2.6.26-1.
Then if you do an upgrade it will suggest something like 2.6.26-...i686 and
after installing you can not boot - I think this was notorious in etch)
If you are not using raid/lvm/encryption or other exotics you can skip the
initrd option on boot thus booting directly the kernel
hope it helps regards
regards
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