[CentOS] kernel panic/abort during boot

[Corey Henderson]

On 12/21/2011 7:44 PM, fred smith wrote:
> Just did an in-place update from 6.1 to 6.2 on my eeepc 901 (Atom CPU).
>
> during boot, (if I hit ESC to see the boot messages) it says "starging udev"
> then nothing else for a few seconds, then a huge register dump scrolls
> by. it's too big to see the beginning of it.
>
> If I boot from the prior kernel and look in /var/log/messages, I don't
> see any evidence of the failed boot.
>
> I've seen the other thread titled "kernel panic", and it seems to be
> due to a missing initramfs, but there is an initramfs for 2.6.32-220.el6
> already in /boot, so I don't think that would be the problem.
>
> Can anyone suggest how I would isolate what's going on here?
>

Take a peek at what is inside the initramfs file:

~ $ mkdir initramfs
~ $ cd initramfs/
~/initramfs $ gzip -d < /boot/initramfs-2.6.32-220.el6.x86_64.img | cpio -id
73012 blocks
~/initramfs $ ls
bin  cmdline  dev  dracut-004-256.el6  emergency  etc  init  initqueue 
initqueue-finished  initqueue-settled  initqueue-timeout  lib  lib64 
mount  pre-pivot  pre-trigger  pre-udev  proc  sbin  sys  sysroot  tmp 
usr  var
~/initramfs $ find lib/modules -name '*.ko'
<snip>

If a module that is required to mount your system (ext3/4, dm_dm-raid, 
etc - very system dependent) isn't in there, then the system won't be 
able to boot. Sometimes they don't get added automatically, for whatever 
reason. If you're able to identify the missing driver, edit this file:

/etc/dracut.conf

And add a line like this:

add_drivers+="name-of-driver"

Then re-run dracut. If you don't know how to do that, then you probably 
should just rpm -e that kernel package, then re-install it.

Hope this helps.

-- 
Corey Henderson
http://cormander.com/