kernel init error

[Brian Kelsay]

I agree with Brian, however I have something hardware related I would check first.
Is your PC newer/newish (1Ghz on up) with an ATA100 IDE hard drive?  If so, you have an 80-wire, 
40-pin cable from hard drive to motherboard.  Those wires are very susceptible to cuts from the 
case and thence to shorting out.  They may work partially.  Check the cable on both sides and both 
edges for cuts.  If it's cut, replace the cable.

Brian Kelsay

>>> "Brian Densmore" <> 03/30/04 08:54AM >>>
-----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. 
<snip>
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