Comment 4 for bug 31790

I just applied some updates and rebooted. This lead to a kernel panic.

The packages that the update installed are as follows:

  tangerine-icon-theme tango-icon-theme ubuntu-base ubuntu-desktop ubuntu-minimal ubuntu-standard udev x-window-system-core x11-common xbase-clients xserver-xorg xutils

None of them look like they would affect /boot/initrd.img-2.6.15-20-686, but the modification date on that file is the same as the time that I applied the updates.

Looking around, I discovered that updating udev modifies the initrd.img file:

(dapper) chris@chrislap:/boot$ ls -l /boot/initrd.img-2.6.15-19-686
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6725161 2006-04-18 16:41 /boot/initrd.img-2.6.15-19-686
(dapper) chris@chrislap:/boot$ sudo apt-get --reinstall install udev
[...]
Preparing to replace udev 079-0ubuntu25 (using .../udev_079-0ubuntu25_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement udev ...
Setting up udev (079-0ubuntu25) ...

(dapper) chris@chrislap:/boot$ ls -l /boot/initrd.img-2.6.15-19-686
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6725163 2006-04-18 16:47 /boot/initrd.img-2.6.15-19-686
(dapper) chris@chrislap:/boot$ date
Tue Apr 18 16:47:35 CEST 2006
(dapper) chris@chrislap:/boot$ uname -r
2.6.15-19-686

(notice in this case I have booted into an older kernel version, since the newest one won't boot due to the kernel panic; I also notice that installing udev only modifies the initrd.img file for the kernel which is currently running - that doesn't seem like it could be the right thing to do - shouldn't it either modify them all or none of them?)

The installation of udev is editing the /boot/initrd.img-2.6.15-20-686 file, resulting in the boot sequence getting broken.

The kernel panic says this, by the way:

  "[4294671.271000] Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unk
nown-block(3,6)

Note that the original bug report doesn't list udev in the list of installed packages, so it looks like it isn't just udev which needs to re-run lilo after installation.