"no init found"

[Ralph Siemsen]

ninjasuit2000-netwinder at yahoo.com wrote:

> The message it gives is:
> VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.

Good - although its possible to get that message when booting a 
comressed ramdisk as well.  Best to also check early in the kernel's 
messages where it echos the command line give to it, which will include 
root=/dev/hda1 or similar.

> Which indicates to me that it is looking in the right
> spot since I only have 2 partitions on the disk 1 swap
> and 1 that is formatted ext2... 
> In netrom I have rootdev set to /dev/hda1 which should
> correspond to the ext2 partition on the drive. 
> I'm not sure if makes any difference, but the
> partitions are numbered backwards on the drive, so
> hda2 is physically before hda1. I set it up this way
> to take advantage of the faster seek times for the
> swap partition and I've run systems setup this way for
> years, so I can't see that it would be causing any problems...

Hmm... its perfectly fine to swap around your partitions any way you 
like, but I've never tried "reordering" the partitions as you describe- 
normally I would just make /dev/hda1 the swap and /dev/hda2 the root... 
then set both "kerndev" and "rootdev" to /dev/hda2 in the firmware...

Check that /sbin/init really does exist on the partition you are trying 
to boot from.  When /sbin/init cannot be found, it tries a few other 
things including /bin/sh which you should definately have.  Since it 
cannot find any of these, the most likely problem is the wrong partition 
being booted, or else all the files on the partition are shifted down 
into a subdirectory perhaps...?

-Ralph