kernel panic

[Jacques B.]

On 9/6/07, Andy Green <andy at warmcat.com> wrote:
> Somebody in the thread at some point said:
>
> > The title of this thread - "kernel panic" - tells me that it was not
> > booting to the kernel (stage 2 boot loader).  So either grub was wrong
> > (looking at the wrong drive/partition because the settings were from
>
> No if I understood it, it was booting the kernel fine.  After it ran out
> of initrd though, it was unable to find the actual root filesystem
> partition.  Under those circumstances it does say:
>
> Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!
>
> so "panic" was the right phrase here, even though it makes one think of
> something quite different.
>

Thanks Andy.

I found this on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Forced-linux-kernel-panic-under-qemu.jpg
where it has the kernel panic you mention.  So am I to understand that
the first two lines in grub.conf will have completed properly (root
..., and kernel ...) and it's only the initrd where the failure occurs
(and only when trying to swap the kernel in RAM for the one on the
hard drive)?

At this point it's for my own trouble shooting knowledge and
understanding of the boot process that I ask this seeing Karl has
resolved that portion of his problem.

Thanks,

Jacques B.