[NTLUG:Discuss] can't boot

[Jeff Demel]

Okay, so there I was playing GTali in Gnome and the damn thing froze.  I
couldn't get it to do anything.

So I rebooted the box, and it won't come back up.  It seems to boot normally
until this error:

mount: error 2 mounting ext3

Then everything fails:

Pivotroot: pivot_root(/sysroot,/sysroot/initrd) failed: 2
Umount /initrd/proc failed: 2
Freeing unused kernel memory: 132k freed
Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.

Then nothing.  It just stops.

Is this telling me that it cannot mount ext3, and therefore is unable to
boot?  If so, is there some kind of disk recovery app or something?  What's
error 2?  I'm pretty much a newbie, and have never seen Linux fail like
this.  Feels like I'm back in Windows.

By the way, it's Red Hat 9 on a P2 350mhz with 144MB RAM.

Any advice would be appreciated.  For now, I'm going to try booting with my
Knoppix disk and see what I can see.

-Jeff