RHEL 6.1 "Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!"

[m.roth at 5-cent.us]

unix syzadmin wrote:
> Since I am still doing the setup, I reboot often.
> I have seen kernel panic message several times "Kernel panic - not
> syncing:
> Attempted to kill init!".  If I powecycle the server through DRAC, it
> boots fine.  Do even the kernel panic is intermittent.

Here's an odd thought, basically, because it just happened to me this
morning, on a server "repurposed" by someone else who shall remain
nameless: I'd just done a yum update, and rebooted. kernel panic. Rebooted
to the previous, which was actually older, and it *looked* like it booted,
but not quite. Turned out that the second drive, that had home directories
on it (for NFS), had been reused, and rather than repartition and
reformat, it had just been slapped in... and grub and fstab were both
looking for LABEL=/... and *both* drives had a partition with that label.

Needless to say, much hilarity ensued....

             mark "/dev/sdbx relabelled once actually booted"