SliTaz Forum

Guest

Guest

Install to HD unable to open an initial console - any ideas?

Evening all,

Been playing around with Slitaz to try and breath a bit of life into an old laptop. The Live CD works fine so tried to install to the HD using the System Tools Installer.

Appeared to successfully complete the Installer, but on reboot the boot didn't work. I was presented with the following text:

Warning: unable to open an initial console.

Kernel panic - not syncing: No init found. Try passing init=option to kernel.

Pid: 1, comm: swapper Not tainted 2.6.30.6-slitaz #1

... and so on

A quick google search suggests that this problem may have been resolved before, but no useful answer in the thread http://vanilla.slitaz.org/index.php?p=/discussion/465/slitaz-fails-to-boot-due-to-kernel-panic./p1

I'm a relative noob to linux so any help will be gratefully received! It's the stable version 3 I was trying to install.

Cheers

Trixar_za

Administrator

Registered: 2011-03-29

Posts: 1,506

Re: Install to HD unable to open an initial console - any ideas?

Can you tell me the steps you took while installing it? What did you enter as options, did you install grub, did you make a separate partition for home, stuff like that.

How is your system configured? Do you have multiple partitions with a HDD or more than one HDD install?

Guest

Guest

Re: Install to HD unable to open an initial console - any ideas?

Hi Trixar_za

I'm working with a laptop that was originally running windows xp. There's a single hard drive partitioned into two - the C:/ for Windows (/dev/hda1), and D:/ (/dev/hda2)which I used to install SliTaz onto.

I followed the New Installation "wizard" from the Live CD system tools menu using the GUI rather than terminal commands (alongside the Slitaz handbook), and used the default values for everything except the choice of partition.

Before installing I checked the GParted tool from the Live CD to work out which partition to use, and used /dev/hda2 as the install path during the wizard. I thought that the wizard formatted the partition into ext3, but looking at GParted again today from the Live CD it appears as though it is still fat32.

I didn't previously have a Grub file, so let the wizard create a new one. This appears to have been saved correctly - after rebooting the grub menu came up, I could select SliTaz and the boot got as far as the "Warning: unable to open an initial console" described above.

Thanks for your help...

Trixar_za

Administrator

Registered: 2011-03-29

Posts: 1,506

Re: Install to HD unable to open an initial console - any ideas?

Ah, it's on the second partition. That explains a lot. SliTaz 3's installer is kind of bad because it assumes you install SliTaz to the first partition. Like you know, this isn't really true.

You should be able to edit the Grub entry at the grub screen (I believe you press e while it's selected). Just change the hd0,0 to hd0,1 - sorry if this sounds vague, but I'm doing this from memory. This should tell grub to boot SliTaz off the second partition rather than the first. This is the most common cause of this error.