kernel panic on RHEL 3 clone

[Maaz]

This system is pretty old RHEl 3 clone and having kernel version 2.4.x.

This System shows following error messages, and failed to boot.

mounting /proc filesystem
creating block devices
creating root device
mkrootdev: label / not found
mounting root filesystem
mount: error 2 mounting ext3
pivotroot: pivot root(/sysroot, /sysroot/initrd) failed: 2
umount /initrd /proc failed:2
freeing unused kernel memory: 228k freed

kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel

Please help/Suggest

Regards
Maaz

[Ivan Ferreira]

mkrootdev: label / not found

Try indicating the partition that contains the root file system to the kernel at boot time, for example:

root=/dev/rootvg/rootlv
root=/dev/sda3

Boot in rescue mode with an installation CD and verify that you have access to the file systems.

[Thomas Callahan]

If you want a true clone, you can run e2label in rescue mode to write the "/" label to the cloned disk.

If you just want it to boot, go into rescue mode and modify the fstab file on the clone to reference a specific block device, instead of "LABEL=/"