Turned on my computer last night, and it wouldn't boot. Something called pivot_root failed, which is probably one of the steps listed in "man initrd". init couldn't be started, so I got a kernel panic. The filesystem (ext3) is fine - I ran fsck -f on it - all clear. It looks like it mounts OK during bootup, and it mounts OK in a borrowed computer. I checked the kernel sources where the panic message originates, and it tries to execve init in a few places then tries to execve /bin/sh before panicking. It wouldn't even try an execve if it hadn't mounted the root fs. I have no separate boot fs, only swap and root. It worked fine the night before. man pivot_root is not much help.
Any suggestions on how to fix the problem so I can continue to work on the talk I'll be giving at the next meeting? Cheers, Carl
