jt

Ubuntu won't boot (I'm on my laptop..Ubuntu Studio)... came home from
work and it says "Panic" and some other funky message. No idea what
happened. Can't get it back... gotta reinstall... lovely way to spend a
Monday evening. Hope to be back online soon.... anyone have any idea
what could cause a "Panic" message ... rebooting in 5 sec message cuz I
sure as heck don't

little girl

If you trust Wikipedia, they've got a definition at : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_panic
<quotes from the page>
A kernel panic is a message displayed by an operating system upon
detecting an internal system error from which it cannot recover; the
term is largely specific to Unix and Unix-like systems. The kernel
routines that handle panics (in AT&T-derived Unix source code, a
routine known as panic()) are generally designed to dump debugging
information to either the screen or a specified file and then freeze
the computer. The information provided is not always useful to the
user, but can sometimes provide troubleshooting data for a system
developer or tech support personnel. Attempts by the operating system
to read an invalid or non-permitted memory address are a common source
of kernel panics. A panic may also occur as a result of a hardware
failure or a bug in the operating system.
<end quotes from the page>

You might not need to reinstall. Can you log into a repair shell?

--
Little Girl

There is no spoon.

jt

Nope. It keeps rebooting on me. Or at least it did before I reloaded
ubby. Remember that "SimpleBackup" program I told you about? Well it
turns out that today is Monday so it did a full backup of the
directories I had marked, so I didn't lose much. And considering all of
our vacation pics were stored in /var/www I'm lucky.

jellybean stonerfish

Stop it before it leaves grub.
Follow the instructions on grub to edit the line, and then boot.
For you kernel options you can remove "quite" and "splash" and add
"vga=normal"

When you boot you should get a bunch of text on the screen. Watch it.
You may get a clue to what is happening right before the panic message.
Then we can tell you how to fix it without a full re-install.

stonerfish

chris game

And then what?

--
Chris Game

"It's not a good idea to look too hard at the words, they
resent it." -- T. Pratchet, "Mort".

hadron

Little Girl <littlergirl@trash.gmail.com> writes:

Of course he can : via a Linux Rescue CD if he has one.

What to do then though ? .....

I'll bet you say "look at some logs" !

A quick google suggests that most people had a corrupt filesystem when
this occurs.

little girl

On Tue, 10 Jul 2007 18:19:25 +0100 Chris Game <chrisgame@example.net>


I'd certainly poke around in my system files and see if everything
looks okay. I'd also try to get a report on my hardware via lspci and
lshw if they're available in the repair shell to see if they kicked out
any errors since the Wikipedia definition of a panic said it could be
as the result of hardware failure. If, for instance, it was my
motherboard dying that was causing it (sorry, can't help it - my son's
motherboard died recently, so I have that on my mind), I wouldn't want
to be reinstalling Linux and risking further damage to hardware. I'd
want to be replacing my motherboard. (:

--
Little Girl

There is no spoon.

little girl

Glad to hear it all worked out and that you didn't lose much! And thank
goodness for backups. (:

--
Little Girl

There is no spoon.

little girl

On Tue, 10 Jul 2007 19:37:07 +0200 Hadron <qadronhuark@googlemail.com>


Not a word about logs.

I guess the question would be whether it would do any harm to take a
look around and run a couple of diagnostics the way I suggest in my
reply to Chris Game. If not, then since "most people" doesn't cover
everyone, wouldn't it be a good idea? Reinstalling Linux is always an
option, but I get the impression from the Linux community that it's the
last option - not the first...

--
Little Girl

There is no spoon.