CentOS - Apr 2007 - kernel panic with OS update

I've a bunch of RHEL4 systems that were originally installed with RH 4.3 
using dd - a "master" system was installed, then the hard-drive was 
copied verbatim using dd to all the new systems.

(Yes, I know that's bad. Yes, I'm working to fix that.)

Recently I put yum on all those machines, created a yum repo and updated 
them to 4.4 with all the updates. That includes a new kernel.

When the new kernel booted up, this is what happened:

Loading ext3.ko module
Creating root device
Mounting root filesystem
mount: error 6 mounting ext3
mount: error 2 mounting none
Switching to new root
switchroot: mount failed: 22
umount /initrd/dev failed: 2
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

The old kernel works just fine.

I don't think there's a hardware or BIOS issue with the new kernel. For 
some reason, I'm inclined to believe that there's some subtle issue with
the file system, due to the install method.
But then why the old kernel is working fine?

I've a feeling that I'm missing something here. Some interaction between
bootloader, kernel and filesystem maybe?

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/

Florin Andrei wrote:
> I've a bunch of RHEL4 systems that were originally installed with RH
4.3
> using dd - a "master" system was installed, then the hard-drive
was
> copied verbatim using dd to all the new systems.
grub.conf looks fine

The master system and the target systems use identical hardware.

I believe the hard-drives are identical too, although I've been able to 
spot some tiny differences on the labels - like, the last number of the 
device type is different (out of a long string of numbers). I am not 
certain if that difference means there are any real differences in the 
geometry. The disks look otherwise identical.

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/