[PLUG] Busted computer
Russell Senior
russell at personaltelco.net
Wed Oct 17 18:12:43 UTC 2007
>>>>> "John" == John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> writes:
John> Yes, there are other reasons. The only good thing I have to say
John> about this machine is that it runs Ubuntu flawlessly and
John> everything has always just worked, except I did have to learn
John> how to use ndiswrapper for the wireless. The quality of the
John> design and the components is the problem. It's two and a half
John> years old and is now in its second keyboard, and many other
John> things have had to be fixed as well.
If you get another one, please consider donating your cast off laptop
to PTP. We are in need of portable computing devices for node
diagnostics and repair. We can also use them *as* access points. If
we can't use them, they'll go to Free Geek.
John> Back to the problem at hand. It is now morning, the first cup of
John> coffee is doing its thing, and the synapses are starting to
John> function again. As a result it occurred to me that I ought to
John> try recovery mode to see what the boot process is hanging
John> on. That resulted in the following:
John> Begin: Running /scripts/init-bottom ... Done. run-init:
John> /sbin/init: No such file or directory [ 35.786176] Kernel panic
John> - not syncing: Attempted to kill init! [ 35.786242]
John> Whereupon it hangs.
It is looking for /sbin/init. That could be in the initrd file. (I
don't use initrd's typically, so forgive my uncertainty, and someone
smarter please correct me), or might be in the root filesystem. You
could try substituting init with a kernel option in the grub kernel
line:
init=/bin/bash
so, if you start with something like this:
title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.22-2-amd64
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-2-amd64 root=/dev/hda1 ro
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.22-2-amd64
savedefault
stop grub from booting automatically, and (following the on screen
directions), edit the kernel line to say this instead:
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-2-amd64 root=/dev/hda1 ro init=/bin/bash
and see if it can find that. That init option tells it to use bash
instead of the init program.
Again, I'll just note that most of the time I've seen this kind of
message it is because it is looking at the wrong filesystem for some
reason.
--
Russell Senior, Secretary
russell at personaltelco.net
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