Kernel panic: No init found

[KoolBreeze]

Hi all

Thanks for checking out this thread, I am a complete noob when it come to linux so any assistance will have to be dummies guide style. I have duplicated a Suse linux box using Ghost. The image created and redeployed fine but upon boot I am receiving

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

I have read about running the command MKINITRD but cant even get box to boot to do so.

Any suggestion would be gratefully accepted.

[hazel]

When the kernel boots, the first thing it does is to run a program called init in the /sbin directory. If it can't find it, you get this panic message. A complicting factor is that most modern kernels don't go to your hard drive directly but start with a disk image in ram - the initrd (initial root device) that you mentioned in your post. This will normally contain the init file as well as a lot of other stuff.

In an emergency you can sometimes get around this by adding "init=/bin/bash" to your kernel boot line. That will tell the kernel to treat the bash shell as its init. Then once you are in the shell, you have some chance of finding out what's going wrong. For example, you can check your bootloader files and make sure that they specify an initrd image and that the image is there to be used.