Kernel Panic

moscher · n00b Joined: 07 May 2002 Posts: 47

hi, i postet this to the gentoo-user-mailinglist recently, but no solution was found, so i decided to post it on the forum as well.

Raistlin · l33t Joined: 17 May 2004 Posts: 691 Location: Boston, MA

hmmm... you're sure the bootloader-entries are correct? do you use grub or lilo?

cheers, raist.
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majx · Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2004 6:41 pm Post subject: Seems lika a bad boot-loader

post your boot-loader config...then we will see more
(but no encrypted password-lines :wink:

)

moscher · n00b Joined: 07 May 2002 Posts: 47

yep it was the the bootloader-entries, thx for pointing me to this... is now working fine

frankf · n00b Joined: 06 Sep 2004 Posts: 5

Great, how about telling me what the solution was? I've got the same problem (after generating my very first ever Gentoo system: 2.6.7.)

Last two messages during boot are:
warning: unable to open an initial console
kernel panic: no init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.

What causes this message?
Is there anywhere a central register of error messages and their probable causes?
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Gr1ff1N · n00b Joined: 15 Jul 2004 Posts: 10

yep please post what u did, cause im getting the same problem over here...
thanx

Tsonn · Guru Joined: 03 Jun 2004 Posts: 550

You might try passing acpi=off in the boot options...

The central register of error messages and possible causes is called google ;-)

... seriously, I find it nearly always comes up with something.

Gr1ff1N · n00b Joined: 15 Jul 2004 Posts: 10

hmmm solved the problem with the kernel panic... i dont know what i did that changed... and then i had another problem but that was in the boot loader grub configuration... so thats that

frankf · n00b Joined: 06 Sep 2004 Posts: 5

I checked google, but it would take me a month to read all the hits about this message, most of which seem to involve other linux flavors than gentoo, and I'm not really too interested in finding out about problems with debian. I've checked /mnt/gentoo/dev and it does contain both console and null devices. Still trying to find out what is wrong.

Very frustrated newbie
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Frank

Zodiak · n00b Joined: 23 Jun 2003 Posts: 25

I have had this problem on several boxes, each time it was because I had my grub.conf file setup wrong. If you are getting to the no init, you have your kernel setup right, my guess is that the following line of your grub.conf is bad:

frankf · n00b Joined: 06 Sep 2004 Posts: 5

Hi Matt,

Here's my partition setup. Maybe I got a little ambitious, but the gentoo handbook does say there's an advantage to having different file systems for different directories. Note that I first had (have) Windows running on this system, then created my Linux partitions and generated Linux-2.6.7-r11.
Created primary 32MB partition for /boot. Made it bootable (but this was a mistake I later had to reverse). Here is the complete table of partitions I created. Note that partitions 5-10 are logical.
ID Bt 1st cyl Last cyl Blocks Type File system Descrip Size Dir
/dev/hda1 * 1 2550 20,482,843+ C N/A FAT32 (LBA) 20GB
2 2551 2555 40,162+ 83 Ext2 Linux 32MB /boot
3 2556 6637 32,788,665 5 Extend
5 2556 2616 489,951 83 Ext3 Linux 496MB /
6 2616 2741 1,004,031 82 Swap Linux swap 1 GB
7 2742 3987 10,008,463+ 83 Ext3 Linux 10 GB /home
8 3988 5233 10,008,463+ 83 10 GB /usr
9 5234 5483 2,008,093 83 2 GB /opt
10 5484 6637 9,269,473 83 9 GB /var

Copied this out of a word table, it doesn't look as neat here. (Is there anyway to attach documents to a post in the forum?) Suffice it to say all the partition numbers 2 thru 10 refer to /dev/hda. hda1 is my Windows boot partition. hda2 is /boot, and hda5 is /root.

Now here's my grub.conf file which doesn't look very much like yours, especially because it doesn't contain an "(hdn,m)/boot" in front of the kernel ID, but this is the way the manual said to code it. (Configuring the bootloader, page 75).

#which system to boot as default: 0 - first, 1 - second
default 0
# how many seconds to wait before default is booted
timeout 30
# splash image
splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz

title= Win2K
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

title=Gentoo Linux 2.4.7-r11
root (hd0,1)
kernel /kernel-2.6.7-gentoo-r11 root=/dev/hda2 vga=794

However, I will try modifying the kernel line and see what happens.

By the way, you should probably know that the next to the last message I get before kernel panic is: "Warning: unable to open an initial console"
which also sounds pretty serious. Note also that while /boot is ext2, /root is ext3. I thought this sounded appropriate, but notice a line in my boot messages:
"VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly"
...but I'm not sure if this is really /root , or just the "root" data from grub.conf.

Many thanks for any assistance.
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Frank

Tsonn · Guru Joined: 03 Jun 2004 Posts: 550

Your problem is that you've passed root=/dev/hda2 to the kernel when in fact your root is /dev/hda5.

It's rather confusing that GRUB means /boot when it says 'root' but the kernel means / when it says 'root'... easy mistake to make.

(incidentally, this answer is the top hit when you search Google for 'gentoo kernel panic: no init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.'... I only thought of searching for that because you complained about all the top hits being Debian ;-)

)

frankf · n00b Joined: 06 Sep 2004 Posts: 5

Thank you very much, Matt. That was the problem. Of course I've got a few new problems now, but at least I have a running Linux system and a clue where to start.
_________________
Frank

moscher · n00b Joined: 07 May 2002 Posts: 47

hi, i solved the problem with just changing the root= option.
i set i to the wrong partition, and that cuased the problem