[ale] Kernel panic: No init found?????

[Joseph A Knapka]

Jim Seymour wrote:
> 
> Hi All,
> 
>         Recently my RH 7.1 system was running very slowly.  It would take
> forever to load a program if at all.  I decided to shutdown and reboot.
> Upon attempting to reboot I got the following:
> 
> Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.
> 
>         I have tried booting the various kernels I have with the same result
> every time.  I cannot find my boot disk and have not been able to figure
> out rescue mode on the RH 7.1 bootable cdrom.  The above message comes
> up right after it has freed the unused kernel memory.
> 
>         Any idea as to what it wants as an option?  I 've never had to enter
> any kernel options with RH 6.0, 6.1, 6.2, 7.0 or 7.1.

Try "init=/bin/bash". If it works, that will get you
a command line on an "empty" machine (no daemons,
no networking, no nothing). You can then browse around
the filesystem and see what's up. Normally init
would be /sbin/init; make sure that file exists, and is
executable.

If "init=/bin/bash" results in the same error, then
it probably means your hard drive's partition table
is fried. If you have a copy of the partition table
around (it's always a good idea!), you can boot into
something like TomsRootBoot and fdisk the HD back
into shape. You will probably need to run lilo
after doing so. Let us know if you get this far.

Cheers,

-- Joe
    Any OS distinguishable from Windows is not sufficiently broken.

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