Kernel Panic - Not Syncing : Attempt to kill init!

[falko]

Originally Posted by jsabarese

i was advised elsewhere to mount the drive and see what i could do from there. based on what you can see from my screen capture, how do i go about "safely" mounting that drive (read-only maybe?) so i can at least get a better look at it? i'm assuming the screen shot shows an "unmounted" drive?
EDIT: in case it's not been mentioned, i'm on FC5 now, just a different hard drive-- and the "faulty drive" is attached as "slave"

You could boot from a Knoppix Live-CD ( http://www.knoppix.org/ ) - it automatically mounts the hard drives in read mode, so you could attach a USB HDD and save your data to the USB hard drive, and afterwards I'd simply reinstall the whole system.

[jsabarese]

so, this is something i want to ensure is done in a "read-only" mode?

if so, why? what would be the consequences otherwise?

EDIT: BTW, thanks for the resourceful idea. it's unfortunate however that the amount of data vs size of my USB media renders that particular solution impractical-- but at least i know the option is there!

I do happen to have an Ubuntu CD-ROM (newest... dapper dan i think), and i'm pretty sure it runs as a LIVE cd. would that be sufficient for the same purpose?

[falko]

Originally Posted by jsabarese

I do happen to have an Ubuntu CD-ROM (newest... dapper dan i think), and i'm pretty sure it runs as a LIVE cd. would that be sufficient for the same purpose?

I think so, but if you don't have enough space on your USB media it's useless as well...