# Kernel Panic after hard reboot.

## matt24

Hi Everyone, 

Am hoping someone can shed some light on this for me.

I have NO experience with Gentoo (have with other distros). I was called to a site yesterday to troubleshoot this error that occurred after a hard reboot of the ftp server - apparently the console froze.

Now when the system attempts to boot it throws up the following messages..

VFS: Mounted root (ext 3 filesytem) readonly

Mounted devfs on /dev

freeing unused kernel memory: 200K freed

Kernel panic: no init found. Try passing init= option to kernel

Ok so having some linux experience I rebooted with from CD and went into linux rescue.

I was able to chroot to /mnt/sysimage.

However here is the problem, I cant locate the grub.conf file. I know grub is installed and is the bootloader used - if I type grub as the shell prompt I get a grub prompt and can pass different options and variables.

I tried to mount /dev/hda1 (boot partition), but this fails as well. Is it possible that grub.conf was corrupted after the hard reboot....is it there but just not mounted correctly?

I tried passing init=3 to the kernel parameter at the grub boot screen - where you can type e for edit, c for command line... but the new options dont save and it just defaults back to how it was.

/etc/fstab contains th following

/dev/hda1           /boot            ext2          noauto, noatime

/dev/hda3           /                   ext3          noatime

/dev/hda2           none             swap          sw

none                  /proc             proc            defaults

none                  /dev/shm       tmpfs          defaults

/dev/cdrpm/cdrom0        /mnt/cdrom       auto        noauto,v1

the directoty /boot/grub exists but there is no grub.conf file..

fdisk -l shows all three partitions boot, swap and / . 

There is another disk in the PC that has redhat 9 installed, but the way it is set up is it uses the BIOS to decide which disk to boot from.

If I choose this disk the system boots into Redhat9 no problems at all...but when I try and boot Gentoo it fails....

any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thankyou.

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## jmbsvicetto

Hi and welcome to the forums.

Have you tried searching for the grub file without mounting /boot? It's possible that the system initially included a separate /boot partition that was later abandoned. If that is the case, you'll have some files under /boot on the root partition.

If all else fails, you can always reemerge GRUB, Gentoo way of installing a package, by doing

```
# emerge -av grub
```

and then you can edit the /boot/grub/grub.conf file and install GRUB.

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## matt24

Thankyou for your advice....it is very much appreciated.

Will try that and let you know how it goes  :Smile: 

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