kernel panic, possibly due to folgers switch of my regular GRUB with new LILO decaffeinated

[Greg Rundlett]

(btw, I bought my two Linux workstations, and will send a msg shortly to
give a summary of what I learned in the process.  Thanks for all who replied
personally, or took part in the discussion.)

I have a 'kernel panic' error trying to boot (after upgrading to) RedHat 8.0

Mounting root filesystem
mount error 6 mounting ext3
pivotroot: pivot_root (/sysroot, /sysroot/initrd) failed:2
umount /initrd/proc failed:2
Freeing unused kernel memory: 212k freed
Kernel panic: no init found.  Try passing init=option to kernel

I figured I would upgrade a RH 7.3 system to RH 8.0.  I performed the
upgrade using the same disks, that were previously used and verified, so I
know the media and ISO's are good.  During the upgrade process, I chose to
upgrade/install all packages (except the KDE i18n packages, because I can't
speak cantonese anyway).  One odd thing that I recall was that the upgrade
'detected' LILO as my bootloader, and suggested that I upgrade my boot
loader.  I am 99% sure that I had been using GRUB on this particular
machine, as it is the default boot loader for RH.

At the end of the upgrade process, I created a boot floppy.

On system reboot, I get a rather stretched and pixelated boot menu screen
(is this Lilo's menu?) that offers me a choice between
2.4.18-14 debug
2.4.18-14 BOOT
2.4.18-14
2.4.18-14  smp
2.4.18-14  bigmem

After selecting the normal 2.4.18-14 option, I get the errors listed above.

This machine is a standard x86 Pentium III with a single IDE drive and 256MB
of memory.

If I reboot using the boot floppy that I made during the upgrade, I get

'boot failed please change disks and press a key to continue'

I have checked the bios (Phoenix 4.6) and the system is configured to boot
from CD, floppy, then HD

So, then I created a new basic boot diskette via 'rawrite' (dd for windows),
copying /images/boot.img off of the first RedHat install CD-ROM and can boot
with that.  I figured out how to get into rescue mode and chroot
/mnt/sysimage.


I looked at both /etc/lilo.conf and /boot/grub/grub.conf.  Both are
identical exept that LILO uses 'boot' in the path and GRUB doesn't.  In the
GRUB.conf comments it tells me that since I have a boot partition, that all
paths for kernel and initrd are relative to this partition eg. kernel
/vmlinuz-2.4.18-14 ro root=LABEL=/  In LILO the kernel paths include the
/boot/ folder eg. image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.18-14  I think since the system
appears to be using LILO instead of GRUB, and LILO is pointing to a
non-existent /boot directory on the root partition, that is why it is
failing.  I know for a fact, and confirmed with fdisk that I do have a boot
partition on this disk.

Should I
a) just change the lilo.conf by removing the 'boot' part of the path
definition of my kernel and initrd then reboot
b) 'install' GRUB under my chroot /mnt/sysimage environment after booting
into rescue mode
c) rerun the upgrade because the mistake could be with a bad init binary
d) something else

(Why on earth I upgraded without making a backup is buried somewhere in
cement inside my head.)

Thanks, and Happy Easter!

- Greg