[Asterisk-Users] Kernel panic - suggestions?

[Kristian Kielhofner]

Rich Adamson wrote:
> asterisk trunk from April 1 on fc3. Box has been up for several months 
> with no issues. Overnight, this remote box died, and rebooting shows the 
> following on the console:
> 
> exec of init (/sbin/init) Failed !!!: 20
> umount /initrd/dev Failed: 2
> kernel panic - not syncing: attempted to kill init
> 
> Does this sound like a hard drive failure?
> 
> The box is about 150 miles away and is inaccessible remotely.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> Rich

Rich,

	This is a more of a Linux thing than an Asterisk thing.  Anyways, it 
can't run init, which usually means the root file system is missing, 
invalid, or can't be mounted for some other reason.  Things to check:

1) New kernels.  Many times (especially with RedHat) this could mean 
that when you installed a new kernel the mkinitrd script messed up on 
something and didn't include a required kernel module in the initrd to 
access the root file system (SCSI host adapters being the most common 
culprit).  Revert to an older/working kernel if possible.

2) File system corruption (bad hard disk or otherwise).  The root file 
system is so messed up the kernel can't execute init.

3) Bad drive.  This would be bad.

4) Wrong kernel parameters.  The kernel passes root= on the kernel 
command line (edit with GRUB or LILO).  If you pass the wrong root 
option, it can't find the root file system (obviously).  Many more 
recent distros are able to use the label feature of ext2/ext3 (and 
others) to find the root file system without having to manually specify 
a device (/dev/sda3, etc).  If you are using LABEL=, try manually 
specifying the device when booting.

--
Kristian Kielhofner