From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3; Linux; , en_US, en) Description of problem: If a RH 7.2, 7.3 or 8.0beta system boots using an init ramdisk, the bootup will fail if no /initrd directory exists. This is bad for several reasons: * the boot process should not die because of such a simple problem * most sysadmins will not know about this fact. upon encountering an empty directory /initrd they might just delete it, figuring it to be some random directory a runaway program created. the next time they reboot - weeks later - how is anybody to know what the reason for the sudden failure is? * the error message "pivotroot: pivot_root(/sysroot,/sysroot/initrd) failed: 2" is absolutely unhelpful and cryptic. It rather suggests that mounting root does not work, the initramdisk is outdated or something like that. I filed this bugreport under "mkinitrd" since the error occurs inside its bootup script. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.set up a system to boot using an initramdisk 2.test that it boots correctly 3.rmdir /initrd 4.reboot Actual Results: the boot process stops with error messages like this: pivotroot: pivot_root(/sysroot,/sysroot/initrd) failed: 2 Freeing unused kernel memory: 220k freed Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel. Expected Results: it should boot without a problem Additional info:
I've just discovered this same solution by myself after 4-hours of fear!!! the problem seems to be simple, but it should be fixed soon please!!
Changed version to 8.0. Maybe this will increase visibility.
Your system will also fail to boot if you do 'rm -rf /etc' but people don't tend to go around doing that. There isn't anything that can be done at this point because the root filesystem isn't mounted read-write yet and so we can't create the directory we need if it fails to exist.