Kernel panic message, but boots ok on next attempt (?)

Hi I have a homebuilt athlon 1Ghz with 4 hard drives. Most of the distros I boot are
on hdb ( the 2nd hard drive on the 1st IDE bus)

Lately I have been getting the following messages at boot:

intrid tools: 0.1.69
mount: fs type devfs not supported by kernel
umount: devfs not mounted
(the previous two lines repeat)
pivot_root: No such file or directory
/sbin/init: 424: cannot open dev/console: No such file
kernel panic: Attempted to kill init!

When I reboot I still get the lines about devfs not supported but the boot succeeds
and I'm in KDE. I get a similar message sometimes booting Kanotix and the same thing
there i.e. rebooting solves the problem.

I have searched and found threads with these error messages, but as yet haven't
found any answers. I don't do upgrades of any kind. This Hard drive install of knoppix 3.5 (DVD)
is about 4-5 months running. Until about two weeks ago I never got the kernel panic message with this install.

Just a wild guess, have you run 'fsck'? or if your drive supports S.M.A.R.T (Self Monitoring, blah, blah, blah) try 'smartctl' - you need to check the man entries, I cannot remember the switches to auto-fix and test respectively.

HD do go wrong.

Stoo.....

Thanks for the advice stukennedyuk. Hard drive failure was my 1st concern too.
I ran the SMART diagnostic and the drive seems fine:

root@kanotix4me:/home/jy/ide-smart-1.4# ide-smart /dev/hdb
Id= 3 Status=39 {Prefailure Online } Value=194 Threshold= 63 Passed
Id= 4 Status=50 {Advisory Online } Value=253 Threshold= 0 Passed
Id= 5 Status=51 {Prefailure Online } Value=167 Threshold= 63 Passed
Id= 6 Status= 1 {Prefailure OffLine} Value=253 Threshold=100 Passed
Id= 7 Status=10 {Advisory Online } Value=253 Threshold= 0 Passed
Id= 8 Status=39 {Prefailure Online } Value=252 Threshold=187 Passed
Id= 9 Status=50 {Advisory Online } Value=243 Threshold= 0 Passed
Id= 10 Status=43 {Prefailure Online } Value=253 Threshold=157 Passed
Id= 11 Status=43 {Prefailure Online } Value=253 Threshold=223 Passed
Id= 12 Status=50 {Advisory Online } Value=252 Threshold= 0 Passed
Id=192 Status=50 {Advisory Online } Value=253 Threshold= 0 Passed
Id=193 Status=50 {Advisory Online } Value=253 Threshold= 0 Passed
Id=194 Status=50 {Advisory Online } Value=253 Threshold= 0 Passed
Id=195 Status=10 {Advisory Online } Value=253 Threshold= 0 Passed
Id=196 Status= 8 {Advisory OffLine} Value=253 Threshold= 0 Passed
Id=197 Status= 8 {Advisory OffLine} Value=253 Threshold= 0 Passed
Id=198 Status= 8 {Advisory OffLine} Value=253 Threshold= 0 Passed
Id=199 Status= 8 {Advisory OffLine} Value=199 Threshold= 0 Passed
Id=200 Status=10 {Advisory Online } Value=253 Threshold= 0 Passed
Id=201 Status=10 {Advisory Online } Value=251 Threshold= 0 Passed
Id=202 Status=10 {Advisory Online } Value=253 Threshold= 0 Passed
Id=203 Status=11 {Prefailure Online } Value=253 Threshold=180 Passed
Id=204 Status=10 {Advisory Online } Value=253 Threshold= 0 Passed
Id=205 Status=10 {Advisory Online } Value=253 Threshold= 0 Passed
Id=207 Status=42 {Advisory Online } Value=253 Threshold= 0 Passed
Id=208 Status=42 {Advisory Online } Value=253 Threshold= 0 Passed
Id=209 Status=36 {Advisory OffLine} Value=196 Threshold= 0 Passed
Id= 99 Status= 4 {Advisory OffLine} Value=253 Threshold= 0 Passed
Id=100 Status= 4 {Advisory OffLine} Value=253 Threshold= 0 Passed
Id=101 Status= 4 {Advisory OffLine} Value=253 Threshold= 0 Passed

The ide-smart manual says the most important valuse is the passed or failed line.
I'm not totally savy on SMART but the advisory and prefailure lines seem to be about the
test-not a indictaor and I ran SMART on a brand new drive with basically the same results.

So I'm back to trying to find what those kernel panic messages really indicate.

This might be unrelated but a few kernel compiles back I had to change usbdevfs to usbfs in fstab. Do you have any mention about devfs in fstab?

Looks like you're getting the same error I have been writing about all over the knoppix and kanotix forums for a long time (since knoppix 3.6 came out). E.g see one thread at http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15903.

I'm pretty sure a second reboot made no difference for me? What made you ever think a second go would get through such a fatal error? :) I've never seen a solution for this problem and have passed on from this issue (I just apt update a Debian unstable system now). What kind of motherboard and hard disk are you using?

Markus: I don't have devfs in fstab. Care to share your fstab?

Markb: I have a shuttle AK11socket A motherboard and I the drive I'm running knoppix & kanotix
from is reported by qtparted as: Model: Maxtor 6Y080P0 capacity: 78167.2

Also it always recovers from the kernel panic on a reboot. I know that's strange but I try anything.
I'm muti-booting 8 distros. I never have a problem with debian woody from the same drive.
However I am thinking of replacing knopppix with sid or xandros

Thanks both of you for the replies. If I can shed anymore light on this problem through my
experiance I'm be glad to help.

Sorry, not at home right now so I can't share my fstab. Probably wouldn't help though as my problem was with usbdevfs. Yours could be a problem with the initial ramdisk trying to mount with devfs when the readonly mount is done. Do you see anything at bootup about module devfs not found? You might want to try to compile a new kernel and skip using initrd in lilo. Another thing to try would be to activate devfs in the kernel but not anything for it:
CONFIG_DEVFS_FS=y
# CONFIG_DEVFS_MOUNT is not set
# CONFIG_DEVFS_DEBUG is not set
I have "# CONFIG_DEVFS_FS is not set" but it might be worth a try.

Thanks again markus. I need to do more reading on devfs. From what I'm experiancing I think
that the problem only occurs when i try to boot with the 2.6.6 kernel. And I was primarily using
the 2.4.26 kernel then I got my scroll mouse working in 2.6 and was using that.

I'm putting that here because perhaps this problem always exisited but I didn't see it
because I wasn't using 2.6. While backing up my files today I noticed the k3b is
garbage in 2.6 ( there were error messages a mile long in the console) but k3b
worked fine in 2.4 I have no idea if any of this is related. But there are definately
Problems here. I like knoppix enough that I'll just keep using it with the 2.4 kernel.

P.S. I do remember a message about devfs in 2.6 but dmesg shows nothing in 2.4

Just to confirm, I blew away all the partitions on my disk, rebuilt them from scratch with the latest cfdisk from the latest Debian sid, reloaded the latest Kanotic BHX-F2 to my disk, ... but I still get this same error. Also, I can reboot as many times as I like but it makes no difference :( [I am installing grub to my partition rather than the MBR, not sure if that makes a difference?]

Markb; I am not sure why I can get my system started with a re-boot but it does work.

I have grub installed with suse 9.0 ( and before that 8.2 ) to MBR and during install of the other
partitions/distros I have that distro install it's loader (lilo in the case of knoppix 3.5 ) to the partition.
I then have menu 1st edited with rootnoverify (hdX, X) chainloader +1 Since I switched to suse 9.0 from 8.2 ,
which in my mind is like a place holder, I have noticed more quikiness i.e. problems loading.

I also have a copy of gujin on a floppy which loads damn near everything.

Hmm, had a look at my Kanotix BHX install and it gives the same stuff at bootup:
mount: fs type devfs not supported by kernel
umount: devfs not mounted

It doesn't bother the bootup though and I rarely have a look at the bootprocess as the box is basically a blind ssh server for me so I haven't even noticed this before.

If you have a look at /etc/default/initrd-tools.sh and /etc/init.d/checkroot.sh you'll see that devfs is used by initrd and checking if the partitions are clean. The only solution that comes to mind is using udev instead of devfs so you might want to have a look at udev also. Kano is making the next BH version so you could also ask in #kanotix if there's any chance of udev making it's way in there.

BTW, a reason for reboot helping could be that the partions aren't checked then as they are at a normal bootup. Not sure about this one though, just a thought.

devfs? udev? What are they? I'd rather wait till this problem gets fixed. As I said it is a problem introduced only in the new versions of knoppix, kanotix (and I bet Mepis 2004.06+) so I'm hoping it will get washed away in later versions.

I prompted kano a couple of times over in his forums but didn't get a bite :( He's an absolute guru. I'm sure if he thought about this problem hard enough he'd guess the solution.

Just more data ...I think. Thanks for the help.

I did a cold boot this afternoon-starting up my athlon box
and choosing kernel 2.4.26 I had no problem with the start up.

I did get those devfs not supported messages. I will read the man
on udev, but I don't know how much I'm willing to mess with my system
Also since 2.4 "seems to be" not affected I'll go with that.

I would like to know more about those devfs messages so I'll
continue the learning curve. How high is it-can't see the top from here :lol:

Thanks again and good luck with your computer(s) If you get any more info
I'll definately look at it.