Kernel panic no init found after installing Saucy

[Nils Kassube]

Colin Law wrote:
> I have installed from the Saucy 64 bit desktop daily image onto a
> spare partition (sda3) on my PC and the install appeared to go without
> problems.  However when I try to boot it I get a kernel panic - not
> syncing: No init found.  Booting into 13.04 on the other partition is
> still ok and from there I can see that that syslog does not exist so
> I presume it is failing before it gets as far as starting loggin. 
> When I boot into recovery mode I can see the terminal o/p before the
> failure.  The lines immediately before the failure are:
> 
> Freeing unused kernel memory: 864k freed
> Write protecting the kernel text: 6232k
> Write protecting the kernel read-only data: 2500k
> NX-protecting the kernel data 4008k
> Failed to execute /init
> Kernel panic - not syncing: No init found
> 
> I can see that initrd.img exists and is a link to
> boot/initrd.img-3.10.0.6-generic which is 17.1MB

The message "no init found" probably means that there is no executable 
"init" in the initrd. You can check it with these commands in a 
terminal:

mkdir /tmp/test-initrd
cd /tmp/test-initrd
cat /PATH/TO/YOUR/INITRD | gunzip | cpio -i
ls -l init

That should extract the contents of the initrd and show the "init" 
script (or at least that's what it does on my 12.04 machine).


Nils