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?