FC5 Kernel Panic!

[James Wilkinson]

David Fletcher wrote:
> I've got no idea why this is happening. The machine in question is at work, 
> and is almost identical to this one. They both have a 3GHz P4 in an Intel 
> D865PERL motherboard, both dual boot XP or FC5, both are running a Seagate 
> SATA HDD. This one has 2G RAM, but the one at work only has 512M.
> 
> This machine gets updated very regularly, but the one at work only gets 
> updated infrequently, because I have to run XP to do my work.
> 
> When I updated the work machine last week, I received kernel 
> 2.6.18-1.2257.fc5smp, according to the Grub screen. If I select the 1.2239 
> kernel it boots ok. If I select the 1.2257 kernel I get
> 
> Uncompressing Linux... Ok, booting the kernel;
> Red Hat nash version 5.0.32 starting
> mount: could not find filesystem '/dev/root'
> setuproot: moving /dev failed: No such file or directory
> setuproot: error mounting /proc: No such file or directory
> setuproot: error mounting /sys: No such file or directory
> switchroot: mount failed: No such file or directory
> Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!
> 
> 
> I found a thread about a similar sounding problem from a couple of months 
> back. It suggested the command
> 
> mkinitrd --with=raid456
> 
> which didn't help me any. I'm not using RAID on either of these machines 
> anyway.
> 
> I suspect that because the work machine gets updated so infrequently,
> sometime it has missed something important in an update, that is not
> now on the mirrors because they have been updated again. Am I correct?

Shouldn't think so.

> Anyway, am I on the right track to fixing this with the mkinitrd
> command?

Almost certainly. I suspect that what's happening is that for some
reason, when you installed the new kernel and it built the initrd, the
appropriate kernel modules for your SATA interface didn't get included.

initrd files are found in /boot and are gzipped cpio files. You could
uncompress them to /tmp and compare the contents of the various initrd
files. Then you could try re-creating an initrd (using mkinitrd) --with
any modules that have been left out.

Or you could try your home kernel and initrd on the work machine -- if I
were you, I'd (a) make a new stanza in /boot/grub/grub.conf to point to
the files you'd brought across, so you could leave your existing kernels
intact (you can rename kernel and initrd files, as long as you change
grub to fit), and (b) edit /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/installonlyn.conf so
that yum updates don't overwrite the old, working kernel until you're
sure the new one works.

Hope this helps,

James.

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