Kernel panic: No init found 1726

On Wednesday 28 June 2006 01:44, Sam stood up and spoke the following words to the mbuttes incomp.os.linux.misc...:

I beg to differ...

Then perhaps your kernel doesn't use aninitial-ramdiskor aninitial-ramfsduring the bootstrap.

I'm not really experienced with current RedHat or Fedora distributions but I am quite experienced with Mandrake-Mandriva, and as I understand it, their boot andinitsequences are still very much based upon the RedHat-Fedora layout, as has always been their tradition.

If you attempt to boot a Mandrake-Mandriva stock kernel - which have been set up to require aninitrdif your root filesystem isn'text2orext3- and provided that the empty directory *-initrd* doesn't exist, the system yields a kernel panic.

The screendump the OP pasted in his message - and which you've snipped out - also clearly states that it fails finding the directory *-initrd* - for your information, this is the section, re-entered here...:

As I said above and as I know from experience, the absence of such a directory in the on-disk root filesystem causes the kernel to panic if it was bootstrapped using aninitrdorinitramfson Mandrake-Mandriva.

Recent analysis of the current Mandriva kernel set-up also shows that they are in fact still following the RedHat boot andinitprocedures.

My advice to the OP was however foremost tofsckhis on-disk root filesystem, as most likely there is something terribly wrong with it after the unclean shutdown.

My older Mandrake system here - which uses a monolithically compiledvanillakernel and doesn't use aninitrd- doesn't need the directory *-initrd* to be present, so indeed, creating or removing it wouldn't have any effect.

However, the stock Mandrake kernels - which do make use of aninitrd- *do* require *-initrd* to be present on the on-disk root filesystem and *will* panic if this directory is absent. On this system, *-initrd* is actually not empty; it contains a single text file.

total 4 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 108 Mar 27 04:12 README.WARNING

(mkinitrd) Don't remove this directory, it's needed at boot time, in the initrd, to perform the pivotroot.

Now, how much exactly did I win again in this bet of yours? ;-)

-- With kind regards,

*Aragorn* (Registered GNU-Linux user #223157)