Dear all,

I' am getting a kernel panic: no init found on my RHEL AS 3 database server. This happened after the system was rebooted after UPS maintenance activity.

I know the best solution would be to enter rescue mode and examine the files. But I have a strange problem. When I enter rescue mode and it attempts to mount /mnt/sysimage, instead of getting the shell, the screen gets distorted with error messages. The error lines do not appear one below the other but diagonally. Something like this:

errorno 5: input/output error some binary characters you may safely reboot the system now.

Also, when I try have a look at the partition labels with druid, it works okay till the manual/automatic disk partitioning screen. After that, it says "Cannot read partition table. The partition table needs to be recreated and all data will be lost". We have configured LVM on the system with four scsi disks. Ther server is IBM xseries 365. The sytem alarm LED is off.

I googled for the whole of yesterday night , and also called a few experts, but their solution was all the same...rescue...chroot...fsck. etc.

I know the system is more or less dead with a bad superblock, but has any of you experienced the distorted screen in rescue mode before?

And yes, please don't ask me to RTFM because I've been doing that the whole night. Also, getting official support from RH would take time as these servers were shipped from Chennai. I am not inviting any flames here, I am not asking any of you to do my research as well. All I'm asking for are inputs from your experience. Thanks a lot.

Regards NMK.