Uh oh! What have I done?! ...kernel panic?!?

[Skinner2]

Hi all. I really hope there is an easy fix for this...

I am dual booting with Mandrake 8.2 and Win98, I was in Win98 playing Unreal Tournament and it was a tad choppy so when I was done
I figured I would scandisk and defrag. Well when I tried to boot into Linux after that I get this error on bootup:

mount: error 22 mounting ext3 flags Freeing unused kernel memory: 260k freed
kernel panic: No init found, Try passing init= option to kernel.

Now I'm a newbie and I really have no idea what that error means. Does anybody have any clue on how to fix this? I can boot into Windows
still...

Thank you all for your help!

 

[slackware1995]

You can try the following:

When it first starts to say "LILO" hit [tab]

at the prompt type boot=/dev/hda1 <-- or whatever the boot partition is ie /dev/hda2 /dev/sda1 etc

when you get to your command prompt (after logging in as root)

type "lilo"

hope that does it for you.

 

[LNXman]

Skinner, 3 things may have happened:
1. The / partition got corrupt ('cause maybe scandisk tried to fix it, but I don't see how), and the inode to the /boot directory that contains the ram boot images Mandrake uses got wiped out.
2. The lilo.conf file got wiped out, or new changes you introduced caused the problems (i.e. you forgot to define root=/dev/<root_partition> in lilo.conf)
3. By chance you changed the drive's location (physically) in the IDE channel, and lilo was not updated with the new location of the root partition.

Try following slackware1995's advice, and try to rerun lilo as root if it boots back up. Hopefully you remember which partition is the root partition that booted up Mandrake.

If it does not work, then since you say you are a novice with Mandrake's version of LINUX, I would suggest to re-install. It would get you going faster.

GL

 

[capybara]

never scandisk and defrag a linux partition with m$ scandisk and m$ defrag.
linux never needs defragging and has its own ver of scandisk. imho. goodluck with
getting drake going or re-installed again

 

[Skinner2]

Thanks for the responses y'all. I didn't try the lilo trick slackware1995 because I ended up doing the following before reading your post...
I didn't really know what I was doing but so far so good...I couldn't straight away reinstall linux because I kept getting errors so I used Partition Manager (I think)
to 'delete' the linux partition (you are right LNXman, it said the partitions were corrupt). Then reinstalled Linux. Everything seems to be working fine now but I
wish I knew what I did to cause the error so I don't do it again...but I doubt I will be running scandisk or defrag anytime soon