kernel init error

[Brian Densmore]

-----Original Message-----
> From:	Jonathan Hutchins
>> After doing nothing more than opening the case to air out the dust, my
>> machine is now unable to boot. There is a mount error 22 mounting ext3,
>> followed by a retry and kernel panic:No init found. I am running Mandrake
>> 9.2 with /boot on hda1. Any ideas? I have the sinking feeling that my HD is
>> dead.
> 
>Open it back up again, and look for what went wrong.  I suspect a loose data 
>cable on the HDD.  Can you hear it spin up when you power on?  Check the 
>power cables too.

That can't be the problem. If the HD was not working/connected he'd never
get a kernel panic. In order to get a kernel panic you have to actually load
the compressed kernel from the HD. So we know the HD is connected, detected, reading the mbr, and 
loading the kernel from /dev/hda1. We also know that at least some of the drive is readable by the 
previous sentence. We also know that it is failing to load the root partition from the above error 
message. I suspect this has to do with lack of ext3 support in the kernel or a wrong entry for the 
root partition in the lilo.conf or menu.lst (depending on the boot loader. Not having gotten any 
more information, it is hard to say which. It could also be that the HD is starting to fail, but I  
consider that possibility more remote. One way to find out would be to boot from the 9.2 CD using 
the rescue option and try to mount the various partitions and check the configuration files.

Brian