My MythTV has been working fine for the last couple of months. Out of the blue today my machine would not boot up. I get the message:



Could someone please explain to me what this means and if there's any way to rescue the machine?

The only thing I can remember doing recently that might have caused it was



Thanks in advance for the help!!

What version of Knoppmyth are you using?
If it's R5E50, vnc runs by default, and you would most likely be correct in your diagnosis.
You can uninstall it by booting from the KM boot cd, exiting the setup program, mounting the root partition then chrooting to it.
Once you are in, you should be able to get rid of the vnc executable with apt-get remove. If that doesn't work, try

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LinHES 7.4
Australian Dragon
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I'm running R5C7. I'll try the boot CD and see if I can get that to work.

What causes this? I've had this happen to me in the past. I thought is a corrupt kernel or partition so I did a complete reinstall. Are there certain programs that do this? When it happened to me I just recompiled ffmpeg. That shouldn't affect the bootup at all, (and neither should vncserver)?

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ASUS A7N266 Micro-ATX Motherboard
Athlon 2200 processor
512K Kingston PC2100 Memory
MicroAtx Case
2 PVR250's w/remote
eVGA e-GeForce mx4000 (64 Ram with Tv/Out (Svideo))
Lite-on DVD cd-rw combo
120 GB Western Digital

It happened to me to once. I found no help so I put in a Knoppix Live cd and FTPed all the video files to my XP machine. Formatted the drive and dumped all the videos back.
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Shutdown my box to move to its summer home; the 3 season room and I got the same error when trying to boot.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
"Mount: device or resource busy (repeated many times)
/linuxrc: out of filedescriptors
/etc/init: out of file descriptors
Kernal panic - not syncing : Attempting to kill init!"
--------------------------------------------------------------------

I had been trying to get the APC ups daemon working just before the move, so an apt-get install apsupsd was the last thing I did before shudown...

booted via knoppix; mounted hda1 on /mnt/hda1 and did a chroot so I could apt-get remove apcupsd and of course that did not resolve my problem...

After much searching (a lot of "stuff" on this with regard to SATA disks but I only have IDE...?

So here is what I did that has given me a work around for now.

I modifed lilo.conf and commented out the line for initrd under the default=Linux section:

"# initrd=/boot/initrd.gz"

then lilo -v

reboot

This allows the system to boot without those errors now!

SO the big question is what am I missing now that I'm bypassing initrd?

Earlier I had gunzipped initrd; mounted and reviewed everything in there and it "looks" OK to me. Restored it back to the way it was and it still didn't work, same error...

Figured a 1/2 hour for the move and ate my whole afternoon; so I'm going to quit while I'm ahead for today.

Hope this helps a few people at least get running and not have to rebuild!

I'm running R5C7 so I should probably upgrade but I have things running SO smooth right now...

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Dell Optiplex GX260 - P4 2.4GHz, 768MB, PVR-250, (1) 120GB, (1) 200GB

I managed to boot to a command prompt using the KnoppMyth install CD and I've mounted the hard drive. I was wondering if it's possible to backup my database and settings and then run the install CD as if I was doing an upgrade to fix the boot up process?

I tried running mythbackup, but it didn't seem to work. I think I'm missing something. Anyone have any ideas on how to get this to work? Thanks!

Did you chmod into the root of the mount? Once you do this, you should be able to start mysql with

Then, you can do a data dump with:


While you're chrooted, you should also backup the /etc directory with


If the mysqldump doesn't work (and I feel that this is your most likely to fail point) tar up the mysql files (/usr/lib/mysql) and try importing them (you may have to look this up, but I think it's possible to import V4 files to V5)

When you're done, ctrl+d out of your chroot environment and copy the files somewhere, like a network drive or partition you won't be touching during the install. Keep them safe!

Good luck

Mike

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LinHES 7.4
Australian Dragon
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Use the tar command from the hints instead. That will produce an archive that works with the restore script.

Hi,

If you are booted from a cd, you may want to mount the /myth partition also. Other wise when you save the tar files it will be on the wrong partition and be destoryed when you re-install / upgrade...

Mike

Thank you to everyone who's contributed to this thread. I was able to resurrect my system using the following procedure:



Hopefully this will be of some use to anyone else unfortunate enough to have this same problem.

I have this exact same problem...

there has to be a fix... I can try the bootup and bypass the initrd.gz like wal0jes

but what then...

if i do an upgrade using the same cd... what all will change on my install?
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MOTORCYCLE TIRES

I just ran into a similar issue on a test system running R5D1 - I had used apt to install a new version of ffmpeg. Well, I wasn't really paying attention and let it install, trouble is that by doing that I allowed initrd-tools to be removed, which led to the dreaded "Kernel panic - not syncing : Attempting to kill init!". If you can boot from the KM CD and quit the installation as soon as you are given the option to, then you should be able to chroot to your HD and run

WARNING: This was performed on my R5D1 system, I don't know what the implications are to running the above on a newer version /WARNING

Hope this helps...

This works on knoppmyth R5E50

boot knoppmyth (once you get the menu)
crtl+alt+2
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1
chroot /mnt/hda1
apt-get update
apt-get install initrd-tools

*If apt-get cant find initrd-tools

vi /etc/apt/sources.list

to the top of sources.list add the following two lines (i had to do this
because apt-get install initrd-tools was not in any of my sources):

deb http://www.ultramonkey.org/download/2.0.1/ woody main
deb-src http://www.ultramonkey.org/download/2.0.1 woody main

(if you dont know vi, press 'i' for insert, then when your done, press esc
:wq <enter>

then:

apt-get update
apt-get install initrd-tools

exit
shutdown -r now

eject cd press enter
reboot and working!

Thanks for the input slowtolean!

Easy enough
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That's good to know

I haven't looked through the sources.list on R5E50. The following are from my R5D1 boxen:

You're very welcome, glad it got you up and running!