kernel panic - not syncing: attempted to kill init!

[Matthias Andersson]

Upgraded to 8.04 (kernel version 2.6.24-16) on Wednesday 16.4 without any problems.
The system worked fine (including installing several updates during the following days) until yesterday 20.4.

During the first session I installed the daily updates (freshclam and lvm). The second session was cut short during the boot with the following error message:

 /init: ./34: Can't open /scripts/functions
[ 20.587228] kernel panic - not syncing: attempted to kill init!

This occured with the default and recovery boot modes, only the older 2.6.24-14 kernel booted up normally.

[Jan Evert van Grootheest (j-e-van-grootheest)]

It appears that your initrd is incomplete.
Would you please check that there is enough disk space in /boot? (try df -h /boot)
And also check the size of the initrd: ls -l /boot/initrd*; compare it with other versions.

You can try recreating the initrd with 'update-initramfs -u 2.6.24-16-generic'. Add a -v for verbose output.

[Matthias Andersson (matthias-andersson)]

On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 12:35 PM, janevert <email address hidden> wrote:
> It appears that your initrd is incomplete.
> Would you please check that there is enough disk space in /boot? (try df -h /boot)
> And also check the size of the initrd: ls -l /boot/initrd*; compare it with other versions.
>
> You can try recreating the initrd with 'update-initramfs -u
> 2.6.24-16-generic'. Add a -v for verbose output.
>
>
>
> --
> kernel panic - not syncing: attempted to kill init!
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/220246
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

[Matthias Andersson (matthias-andersson)]

Sorry about last message, was ment to discard that one.

I have 520 MB free on /boot (located on root partition).
Will try to create a new initramfs.

[Matthias Andersson (matthias-andersson)]

I ran the command update-initramfs -vu 2.6.24-16-386 and it seems to
have hit the spot.
What could had corrupted the old configuration, some error on shutdown or?

//Matthias

[Jan Evert van Grootheest (j-e-van-grootheest)]

Matthias,

Matthias Andersson wrote:
> I ran the command update-initramfs -vu 2.6.24-16-386 and it seems to
> have hit the spot.
> What could had corrupted the old configuration, some error on shutdown or?
>
> //Matthias
I've occaisionally had this as well. The ones I could trace were all
caused by disk full situations. And one or two unclean shutdowns (I have
/boot on an nfs server in dom0 so it can get to the files needed to
boot) where data had not been send out yet.

-- Jan Evert

[Leann Ogasawara (leannogasawara)]

Just closing this report for now as it appears to have been resolved. Janevert, thanks for helping Matthias debug.