Re: [tlug] Kernel panic

[Brian Chandler <brian@example.com>]

David Shanahan wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 7:56 AM, SL Baur <steve@example.com> wrote:
>
> > Brian, when you were looking for mkinitrd and yaird were you looking
> > in the rescue environment or on your mounted system disk?
>
>
> It seems that on Ubuntu 7.10 mkinitrd is replaced by mkinitramfs.
> I am running Ubuntu 7.10, the same version as Brian.
>
> The man pages also suggest to use update-initramfs instead. Just bear in
> mind
> it could have been a problem somewhere that tripped up this script in the
> first place.
> Problems like the /boot partition being full. This is apparently addressed,
> but in the
> next version of Ubuntu.
> http://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardyInitramfsErrorHandling
>
> Brian, try following Steve's instructions to chroot to your installation and
> try this:
> update-initramfs -k 2.6.22-14-generic -c

The recovery boot menu gives a choice of a shell in the recovery 
filesystem[?] or in a hard drive, and I had chosen /sda1, which I think 
means effectively I'd already done the chroot thing.

Aha! It said something about "building initrdsomething", whirred for a 
few seconds, and there is was. When I rebooted there was something about 
finding disk errors, and the whole system restarted, but it's back now.

Many thanks for various suggestions.

Well, my next question is: ok, now I know something slightly more about 
how the system boots, but not much more about how I _should_ have gone 
about finding whatever information I needed to know. Where are these 
"man pages"? (Ubuntu man pages? Not "man ubuntu", surely?)

I'm not yet using this particular computer for "production" work, so it 
was no great problem that it took 3-4 days to sort out. But I will be, 
and I'm concerned that if this (something else, of course!) happened 
again it could be problematical...

Brian Chandler