So last night a RHEL3 machine at went down for patching and sadly it didn’t come back. Here’s what was sitting on the console when I got to the console. Nice… a kernel panic :/

pivotroot: pivot_root(/sysroot,/sysroot/initrd) failed: 2 umount
/initrd/proc failed: 2 Freeing ununsed kernel memory: 228k freed Kernel
panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.

So after spending a significant amount of time troubleshooting the file systems, rebuilding the initrd, trying different init=arguments and trying different kernels I took a good hard look at the error message. Its talking about /sysroot/initrd but I don’t see a directory named /initrd when I look at the root filesystem. So I tried this:

mkdir /initrd
reboot

And to my surprise the system starts happily booting along. All that over a little directory, sheesh. Turns out that this directory was removed by someone or something that thought it wasn’t needed, doh.

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