Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

[Paul Smith]

On 10/27/06, Phil Meyer <pmeyer at themeyerfarm.com> wrote:
> >> > Thanks, Lonni. Something really funny happens now: it boots, but it
> >> > goes to the FC4 partition instead of going to the FC6 one. Grub
> >> > activates the partition of FC6 and then mysteriously goes booting the
> >> > FC4 partition. What magic is playing on my computer?
> >>
> >> Check the labels. Probably grub is using the wrong labels to mount the
> >> root filesystem (and other filesystems you may have). One way to test is
> >> editing the grub entry at boot time (press any key when the grub menu
> >> appears, choose the FC6 entry and press "a" to edit the kernel
> >> parameters) and replacing root=LABEL=/ by root=/dev/hdaX , so it
> >> explicitly points to the device where the FC6 filesystem resides. This
> >> way , there's no chance the FC4 partition will be mounted by mistake.
> >
> > Excellent guess, Pedro! However, there is still a problem to overcome:
> > I cannot boot in the FC6 partition:
> >
> > «ERROR opening /dev/console: No such file or directory
> >
> > WARNING: can't access (null)
> >
> > exec of init ((null)) failed!!!: Bad address
> >
> > kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!»
> >
> > Any ideas?
> >
> Same problem as stated by Pedro.
>
> (In My Opinion)
>
> Running two Fedora partitions on the same hard disk from grub is
> difficult to impossible if BOTH sets of partitions receive the same
> labels, and that does happen.
>
> Let me explain it a bit.
>
> You will notice in grub text like this: root=LABEL=/
> Sometimes you will see: root=LABEL=/1
> or: root=LABEL=/2
>
> This is because anaconda is trying to make unique labels, and will try
> to increment the counter.  This bit of anaconda does not always work
> predictably.
>
> For example, my laptop got /1 with just a single disk drive, and no
> other operating systems loaded.
>
> These same labels are used in /etc/fstab to mount the root and boot
> partitions.
>
> In your case, you probably have both grub and /etc/fstab referring to
> the same labels for both versions of Fedora.  Boot from a rescue CD and
> examine the grub.conf and fstab for both OSes.  You will find that they
> are using the same labels. :(
>
> Thus, when mount is asked to mount a partition whose label is / it sees
> two that match and takes the first one it sees.
>
> Recovering from this problem is tricky.  You MIGHT be able to specify
> real devices in grub.conf and fstab and make it work.
>
> You MIGHT be able to change the labels (expert only here) for one of the
> OSes and change grub.conf for those slices.
>
> Both of these options require some pretty advanced tinkering.
>
> Sorry about that.  For most folks, reinstalling FC6 and hoping anaconda
> will do the 'right thing' this time is probably more feasible.

Thanks, Phil! I have just been able to boot in FC6 with the following
grub.conf file:

default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu

title FC6
        root (hd0,1)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 ro
root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
        initrd /initrd-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6.img
title Windows
        rootnoverify (hd0,0)
        chainloader +1

Paul