Kernel panic. No init found.

[Luke Morgan]

Hi,
I have installed Redhat onto a ProLiant DL380 G3. I've tried several versions now, although I
am currently trying 7.3 as that is what I want to stick with.
They all install fine and seem to run ok, except for the boot disk. If I try booting to it, I get
kernel panic: no init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.

Does anyone know why this is happening? and what I can do to make the boot disk work?

Thanks

Luke

[Vitaly Karasik_1]

so you're able to boot from harddisk but not from floppy?

[Luke Morgan]

Yes, that's the problem.

[Vitaly Karasik_1]

try to recreate boot floppy by

"mkbootdisk `uname -`"

Vitaly

[Luke Morgan]

I assume you mean uname -r ??

I have just done that and rebooted.
Same problem.

[Brian Bergstrand]

I've been out of Linux admin for the past couple of years, but IIRC booting from floppies required two disk images. One boot disk containing the compressed kernel and one root disk containing the root filesystem. If this is still the case, have you made both floppies? The kernel should prompt you at the appropriate time during boot to insert the root disk. Also, have you tried multiple floppies? Floppy failure rate is notorious.

[Nobody's Hero · Accepted solution]

I encountered the same problem and resolved the issue by going to RH9. Most of my problems were resolved by upgrading. I also had this error running mondo. Now mondo works fine under RH9 and I write all information to CD-RW. That is the way to go.

[Sergejs Svitnevs]

The kernel looks for the init command which is located in /sbin/init. And /sbin directory lives on the root partition. Check your /etc/lilo.conf (or /etc/grub.conf) on the hard drive, and compare it to the one on the floppy. Check out the root=/dev/???? line and fix as needed.

Regards,
Sergejs

[Luke Morgan]

I have two problems with that.
I would prefer to stick with 7.3 although I am not totally averse to using RH9.
However, when I try to install RH9, it gets partway through the install procedure, and then tells me that I don't have a RH9 CD in the drive...

[Zeev Schultz]

This is strange,I've rh9 installed and especially remember the install procedure checking my CDs (means asking me if I want to get them checked) before starting install process.Probably,your media is bad.

As to mkbootdisk image,check this thread:
http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=65207
Are you using grub (and not lilo) as boot loader?

[Luke Morgan]

I've just tried to install RH9 via ftp instead.
It connects ok, and asks me options regarding upgrade or reinstall etc.
I have tried several options.
Each time, it fails when trying to read packages. It says it has an error reading package headers.

I am now going to try using NFS.
I haven't installed redhat that way before.
Do I put the iso images, or the contents of the CDs redhat directories into the NFS share?

[Luke Morgan]

Success!

Using NFS, I have managed to install RH9.
The boot disk will now work when it wouldn't
for 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, or 8 ...

Thanks all for your input.

Luke