[K12OSN] Booting Problems

[Les Mikesell]

On Fri, 2004-09-17 at 01:09, ben may wrote:
> after having a power cut, i realised that my UPS was not working, now at
> boot my server says 'Kernel Panic: No Init found try passing init= option '
> after google-ing that there were a few people that have had the same
> problem. but no answers.
> 
> I have alot of data that i dont want to loose so re-installing is my last
> option, or can i just reinstall with out loosing data in /home dir?

Out of curiosity, is this an old 3.x system with ext2 filesystems
or 4.x with ext3?  I've had several ext2 problems where the
automatic fsck at bootup would fail because there were too many
errors, but it would drop to a shell and suggest doing it
manually.  Doing that and answering 'y' to all the fixes always
worked for me as long as the drive was still functioning.

I'd try booting the install CD first, with 'linux rescue' at
the boot prompt.  This may perform the fsck you need and will
try to mount the existing partitions so you can chroot there
and check things out.  The fedora based versions will also
offer to bring up the network interfaces so you could back
up some files if the root partition is hopelessly broken.
If the partitions look OK in the rescue mount but still
won't boot, you may be able to fix it by doing an 'upgrade'
from the CD's instead of an install.

I'll plug backuppc again (http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/)
as the most painless way to have backup copies of things
when you need them.

----
   Les Mikesell
     les at futuresource.com