Argh, new kernel = no booting!

DRZ

DRZ

DRZ

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Running Ubuntu here, was all fine and dandy running 6.06 with the 2.6.15-27-686 kernel.

Updated to Ubuntu 6.10 which by default installs the 2.6.17-10-generic kernel.

Instead of lightning-fast booting I get "Kernel Panic - not syncing: attempting to kill init" followed by a hard crash.

I can still boot into 2.6.15-27-686 just fine but I cant boot into any flavour of the new kernel. I have tried booting with noacpi in the kernel options but still no joy (although the numbers in the square brackets to the left of the error message change from 39.xxx to 72.xxx when I do).

Any ideas at all?
 
deano said:
hi,

theres a few suggestions here:-

http://www.google.com/search?q=2.6....f-8&client=flock&rls=FlockInc.:en-US:official

you could give us some help by posting your machine spec at least ;) and the out put of dmesg may be help full ( dmesg >dmesg.txt = nice text file )

cheers
Deano
Click to expand...

System spec is a 2.53Ghz Celeron, 512Mb ram, cheapo MSI mobo with onboard VGA and LAN, Netgear GA311 gigabit nic, crappy software raid controller card that is being used as an extra IDE controller, 1x160Gb drive, 2x 320Gb drives, all IDE.
As it hard crashes, I cant get to dmesg for the kernel thats spacking out on me. Unless the output from 15-27-686 is useful to you?
 
Really need more information, like what step in dmesg does it get up to before it panics?


You can give this a try, boot the kernel you can actually run.

First try,
sudo aptitude reinstall linux-restricted-modules-2.6.17-10-generic
Reboot.

Then if that fails,
sudo update-initramfs -u -k 2.6.17-10-generic
sudo mkinitramfs -o /boot/initrd.img-2.6.17-10-generic 2.6.17-10-generic
sudo update-grub

Make sure initramfs-tools is the latest.

If that fails,
lspci -v > hardware.txt and upload it somewhere as well and the old dmesg from the previous kernel.
 
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was just going to say it might not be an actualy kernal problem but more of an init image problem....

I use LFS and when I (re-)compile a kernel I don't use an image.... runs the rish of VFAT errors when it can't find root to mount it read only but hey thats usually coz ether me or kernel have done something stupid....
 
Una said:
Really need more information, like what step in dmesg does it get up to before it panics?


You can give this a try, boot the kernel you can actually run.

First try,
sudo aptitude reinstall linux-restricted-modules-2.6.17-10-generic
Reboot.

Then if that fails,
sudo update-initramfs -u -k 2.6.17-10-generic
sudo mkinitramfs -o /boot/initrd.img-2.6.17-10-generic 2.6.17-10-generic
sudo update-grub

Make sure initramfs-tools is the latest.

If that fails,
lspci -v > hardware.txt and upload it somewhere as well and the old dmesg from the previous kernel.
Click to expand...

Hmm...

update-initramfs (as root) returns an error of "[: 89: driver: unexpected operator"

It might be easier to just stick with 2.6.15-27 until there is a new kernel out and try again. Will post up the outputs from lspci and dmesg a bit later on.
 
DRZ said:
Hmm...
update-initramfs (as root) returns an error of "[: 89: driver: unexpected operator"
Click to expand...

Thats not right for a start to be honest, sounds like a broken package.

Would be quicker to build your own kernel from source, and that way its the latest as well.
 
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Una said:
Thats not right for a start to be honest, sounds like a broken package.

Would be quicker to build your own kernel from source, and that way its the latest as well.
Click to expand...

Yep - bit scared about doing that tbh (kernel upgrade newbie) so am going to create an image of this (working but slightly broken) drive first then tackle it head-on.

Looking at the Ubuntu forums it would appear many, many people are having dapper-->edgy issues :(
 
re-compiling kernel from source is easy... provided you have a DMESG output....
first time arround extract kernel source and cd into the dir...
Code: 
make menuconfig
make
make modules
make modules_install
when you do a "make menuconfig" it will bring up a colourfull screen with various drivers and 'features' just use the arrow keys and go to exit. when it says do you wish to save say yes...

Once it's finished installing the modules theirs three files you need to manually copy three files. I'm not firmiliar with Ubuntu so if wrong someone will correct me....
in current directory...
Code: 
cp System.map /boot/System.map.XX.XX.XX
cp .config /boot/config.XX.XX.XX
cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/Kernel-XX.XX.XX
Note: XX.XX.XX is the version of the kernel you downloaded

next you need to configure the boot loader (trust me it's simple) however I don't know which boot loader Ubuntu uses...

someone cherp in please
:edit too many MAKES in on of the code blocks
 
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