Error message "Attempt to kill INIT" on Debian

Well I am getting the same error message that mentioned on my Debian based system. I am not able to get why it does happen in my situation. Error message is ‘Kernel panic - not syncing - Attempted to kill init’. Let me know if you can give me brief idea of why said issue occurring in my situation. I am waiting for your prompt replies. Thanks a lot in advance.

In many situation kernel is not able to get how to proceed at the time of booting then it should be called as panic. You will get an error message on the screen by panic () routine. It will also give you brief idea of the thing that caused Kernel Panic. The Panic() routine simple runs sinc() so that all the data should be transferred to the hard disk before system gets down. The Kill init part of the error message supposed to call panic().

Actually init process is not getting killed rather it simply tries to die. In fact one cannot idle the process or kill it by any mean. Most probably such issue happened at the time of booting up of the system. It would be really great if you are having source code which might be stored at /usr/src/linux-2.x directory. To get the code which is causing issue I recommend to use Grep command.

Looking at the situation I am suggesting following thing which you should try and see whether it worked for you or not. First of all boot into single user mode and see whether system log is having any error message on the same. By running dmesg would display message with respect to current boot of your computer. Even system would get restarted after showing the message on the computer screen.

Check out into /var/log/messages, /var/log/syslog or /var/log/dmesg if any messages are over there.

After that try to configure Console device by using serial port. Simply connect another computer by using serial port and execute terminal emulation program on your computer. If any error message thrown by system would get collected into serial port and should be displayed on terminal emulator. There will not be any issue if you are already having serial port computer

If you are having Live CD I recommend to do linux rescue at boot time of CD. Once you had managed to mount the boot partition, execute following command.

Code:

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fdisk –l
cat /boot/grub/grub.conf
cat /etc/fstab.

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You will also need to checkout the file system.
To test boot partition you will need to execute following command

Code:

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# fsck /dev/hda1

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To test logical volume you should execute following command

Code:

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# vgscan
# vgchange -ay
# fsck /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00

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Finally to mount your file system by using following command.

Code:

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# mount /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /mnt
# mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/boot
# chroot /mnt

# cat /boot/grub/grub.conf
# cat /etc/fstab

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Looking at the situation I am suspecting that there could be hard ware issue particularly with system memory. So I suggest you to run Memtest 86+ and let me know about the result. In case you did not get any suspecting in Memtest then check out that SMART is enabled into BIOS setup. Also run ‘fsck’ from terminal and see whether it makes any difference into the situation. Just a sack of try append following line at grub boot line.

Code:

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enforcing=0 autorelabel

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Let me know if there is any reference to /dev/hd? If so then simply update /etc/fstab. Even you can make use of LABEL= or UUID=in order to identify partition. Simply put values that are generated by ls -l /dev/disk/by-label or ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid command on the right side of ‘=’.