[ale] init problem after dist-upgrade

[Chuck Peters]

On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 11:38 AM, Narahari 'n' Savitha
<savithari at gmail.com>wrote:

> Friends:
>
> I upgraded my ubuntu with the command sudo apt-get dist-upgrade.
> I then have a new entry in the grub list.
>
> When I boot to the .25 or .24 version of the kernel, I get the message
>
> init not found, pass value to init.
>
> I am not sure how to do this and also why this even happened ?
>
> I have not made any hardware changes.
>
> -Narahari
>
> PS:  For me to post screen shot please let me know where and how to post
> images.
>

Don't bother with the screen shots.

Maybe I should first mention:  Do you have your data backed up?  If so you
can reinstall and recover...  Or use a LiveCD and backup your data to a USB
drive or rsync over the network.

But if this is right you will need to fix the filesystem before recovering
the data...
First hit of google Maverick init not found, pass value to init
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1594621

All they did was manually fsck the filesystem. fsck is file system check for
ext2,3,4 file systems.  They didn't seem to cover how they did it all that
well since it seems to have just one partiton, so here is a little trick
that might make it easier. Put a file called forcefsck in the root of the
partition or partitions will force the file system check.

Boot with a LiveCD, probably what you used to install Ubuntu. Use whatever
GUI file manager thing they have, the web page talks about using gparted, I
thought that was for partitioning, not mounting drives... In kde dolphin is
the default GUI file manager, to mount the partition or partitions, click on
the left side.  Make sure it is a ext partition, you don't want to do this
on xfs or other partition types without making sure you don't need other
options or whatever, ie xfs has its own repair utility.
Open a terminal...
df -h, or lshw or dmesg to determine the filesystem you want.
mount with no options to check the filesystem type
sudo touch /forcefsck  using the correct path.

For example I plugged in a 40GB PATA drive with one of those USB adapters.
Mounted it with dolphin.
cp at meerkat:~$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1              19G  4.3G   15G  23% /
...
/dev/sda7             270G   22G  248G   8% /home
/dev/sda6             9.2G  2.3G  6.5G  26% /mythbuntu
/dev/sdb1              36G   22G   13G  64% /media/disk
cp at meerkat:~$ mount
/dev/sda1 on / type ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro,commit=0)
...
/dev/sda7 on /home type xfs (rw)
/dev/sda6 on /mythbuntu type ext4 (rw,commit=0)
/dev/sdb1 on /media/disk type ext4 (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal)
cp at meerkat:~$ sudo touch /media/disk/forcefsck
cp at meerkat:~$ sudo umount /media/disk
and reboot without the CD...

Hopefully all goes well, it will take longer than normal to boot since the
fsck can take a while depending on the size of the partition(s).

If it doesn't work you will likely see some message about having to run fsck
manually.  Repeat the above steps and run fsck on the partition.  In the
example above I would run fsck /dev/sdb1.


My first thought was it sounds like grub, the boot loader, can't find the
root filesystem.  For that see:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2

Look at the "Reinstalling Grub" and "Command line and Rescue mode"
sections.  Usually the easiest way to do this is boot with a LiveCD, aka the
standard Ubuntu CD you used to install it (not the alternate cd) or a USB
key setup properly with the LiveCD.  Note it can be done with the alternate
CD or other boot/rescue tools, but then you are limited to command line
(can't open firefox to the above URL) and make sure you have the right
version of grub.

I should mention a couple caveats here. grub-install -v as mentioned in the
help page will tell you the version of grub on the livecd. You should be
able to determine the version by looking in the logs of the install, in the
above example /media/disk/var/log/apt/term* or
/media/disk/var/log/installer/ ,   The page mentions "No *
/boot/grub/menu.lst*. It has been replaced by */boot/grub/grub.cfg"*. They
have changed the way grub works, so on an upgraded machine you may have the
menu.lst file, all my 10.04 machines were upgraded and still have the
menu.lst file.

If the problem is as Mike Warfield suggested, the solution is to mount the
partition(s) and use a chroot to reinstall the kernel or manually recreate
initramfs.

Chuck
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