New kernel, kernel panic - not synching: No init found.

maserding · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 25 Feb 2004 Posts: 132

Hello,

I have been running gentoo a long time, and usually the kernel upgrade is a breeze. I have to upgrade from 2.6.17.3 to 2.6.23.16 because of the vmsplice() problem.

I upgraded as normal, rebooted, and I get a panic, saying

Mounted root (ext3 filesystem) readonly.
Freeing unused kernel memory: 152k freed
Warning: unable to open an initial console
Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel

I don't use initrd. So it isn't that. I think it might be that I use root=/dev/sda in my grub config. I never had a problem doing this before, sda has no partitions, I just formatted it directly. The reason I think this might be the problem though is I changed it to root=/dev/sde3 which is invalid and forced gentoo to list possible root= candidates. It would only list the harddrives that have partitions, and not my /dev/sda or /dev/sdb

My question is, does the kernel now require you boot from a partition? Or should root=/dev/sda work?

sundialsvc4 · Guru Joined: 10 Nov 2005 Posts: 436

I'd say that "something is wrong." I'd be hard-pressed to think that a partition was now required. Probably the best thing to do is to boot a stand-alone CD such as Knoppix, and see how the hard-drive is detected and how it is mounted.

maserding · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 25 Feb 2004 Posts: 132

maserding · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 25 Feb 2004 Posts: 132

I ended up just giving up and patching my old kernel for the vmsplice vulnerability.

steves · n00b Joined: 10 Jan 2005 Posts: 30

I had a similar problem with the new 2.6.24 kernel and a posting some time ago worked for me.

With the gentoo-sources as downloaded run "make defconfig" then "make menuconfig" or whatever you use normally to tune the kernel to your configuration. This worked for me. I didn't have time to figure out why.

Good luck

Steve.