[TriLUG] Kernel Panic - any takers?

[Byarlay, Wayne A.]

I have (had?) a Linux machine with 3 HD's: two "data" drives (mounted as
/data1 and /data2), and the standard RH allocations for /dev/hd0 on a
different drive. About a month ago, the maxtor 200Gb drive which was
/dev/hdc I believe, mounted to /data1, began acting strangely. I would
get file errors, etc., and stuff that indicated a corrupted filesystem.
I rebooted, and the problem went away. I should have run fsck a long
time ago, but I didn't. So anyway...

Today I checked my logs for this computer (It's my Amanda backup
server!) and the backups failed last night. So I logged in via ssh and
cd'd to /data1. Well, "ls" reveals... nothing. No subdirs, no big,
honking files that should be there. however, "df" says that /dev/hdc is
84% full, etc. So, I reboot again.

It comes up in some sort of (File check) mode,  (or press CTRL+D to
continue, which merely rebooted the system), because it cannot boot
properly. So I decide to run fsck; after getting a "safe-mode" looking
login prompt. A bunch of errors fly by indicating some inode stuff, I
did not examine them too closely. (I ran fsck -rV /data1 or something
like that). Well, now, when I reboot, I get the Infamous:

Kernel Panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.

The boot loader comes up, so SOMETHING must be mounting correctly, no? I
sincerely hope I have not somehow hosed my /.

I have no idea what "options" to try and pass to the kernel... how about
"work=yes"? "Boot=perfectly"?

I really do not want to rebuild a server tonight...

~wab~