On Sun, Dec 14, 2003 at 10:46:06AM -0600, Jim Crumley wrote: > Hi, > > Yesterday I tried to put a DVD burner and an extra hard drive > into ai Debian testing box, and I have been getting kernel panics > ever since. I think that the panic is happening right when the > sytem is trying to mount the root filesystem. The last few lines > I see are: > > EXT3-fs: mounted filesytem with order data mode > exec: 217:chroot not found > kernel panic: attempted to kill init This looks like your init-ramdisk is somehow busted. Like init-rd unpacks, figures out it's real root is EXT3-fs, then tries to mount it as root and chroot to it, but can't find chroot. Debian seems to use these init-rd things by default. This allows for most root fs support to be compiled as modules, with only init-rd root filesystem in as a non-module. It initially boots into this small init-rd root fs, then through the magic of scripting can figure out and load the kernel modules to support your real root fs. I'm not so good at compiling kernels the "debian" way yet, but I'm sure this would involve producing a matching init-rd.img. Then you have to configure your boot loader to use it. I have always avoided using init-rd with my custom kernels. Or if you do compile a custom kernel and use a ext3 fs, I'd recommend building ext3 directly into the kernel as apposed to a module so that you are not dependent on init-rd. Are you using LILO or GRUB? Do you have your kernels matched up with cooresponding init-rd.img? Did you build your kernel with ext3 built in so you could tell your bootloader to boot without the init-rds? > Since then I have tried a number of things to fix the problem. I > have returned the hardware to the original configuration. I have > tried booting other older kernels on the same box. No luck. > > I did change the kernel on this box a couple of weeks ago, but it > booted fine then. I am suspicious that my problem relates to > this, but that wouldn't explain why my old kernel s don't work > either. > > It boots fine under Knoppix and I have played around a bit. My > disks fsck fine. I can run lilo OK and I get no errors. > > At this point, I really don't know what to try next. Any > suggestions? > > -- > Jim Crumley |Twin Cities Linux Users Group Mailing List (TCLUG) > crumley at fields.space.umn.edu |Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > Ruthless Debian Zealot |http://www.mn-linux.org/ > Never laugh at live dragons |Dmitry's free,Jon's next? http://faircopyright.org > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org > https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list