Arch Linux

NIRz

Member

Registered: 2008-05-09

Posts: 24

[Solved] Kernel panic after pacman -Syu (not syncing)

Hi all,

I'm using the same arch installation for about 4-5 months.
After doing a system update using "pacman -Syu" I got a kernel panic after the reboot saying:

kinit: Cannot open root device sda3(8,3)
kinit: init not found!
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

Now the first line of the kernel panic is pretty weird because my /boot/grub/menu.lst has:

title Arch Linux
root (hd0,2)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/sda3 ro acpi=force rootflags=data=writeback
initrd /boot/kernel26.img

Another thing, this is a very old laptop with a dead optical drive so my only way to install arch is PXE (from another vista machine)
and I have to do it with the 2008.3 iso because I can't figure how to run the 2008.6 installation using PXE.

So I netbooted the 2008.3 kernel via the vista machine, and did:

mount /dev/sda3 /mnt
mount -t proc proc /mnt/proc
mount -t sysfs sysfs /mnt/sysfs
chroot /mnt /bin/bash

then configured my network, and "pacman -Sy kernel26", rebooted and it didn't help.

I also tried (after the new kernel installation in the chrooted environment):

mkinitcpio -p kernel26

but again, with no luck.

I'm out of ideas right now, can someone please help?

Last edited by NIRz (2008-09-29 13:56:56)

NIRz

Member

Registered: 2008-05-09

Posts: 24

Re: [Solved] Kernel panic after pacman -Syu (not syncing)

Well, problem solved, all I needed to do was to run the fallback kernel and run mkinitcpio - p kernel26.