Kernel Panic and EIP on the Hoover

The Hoover (desktop — CPU fan sounds like a vaccuum cleaner) is sick. Very sick. Can’t get it to boot using BartPE, Windows XP Pro installation CD, or Linux Live CDs. This is serious.

The Mutagenix Linux Live CD barely got started booting when it threw serious error: Kernel panic – not syncing: Attempted to kill init! I found a good explanation on Linux Questions and Linux Tutorial.

Apparently the kernel panic error means that the system encountered something that caused the kernal to bomb. The explanation above indicates the cause of the problem is probably listed directly before the kernel panic error. The error message immediately prior is: EIP: [c01c9c66] txInit+0x20b0x2ae SS:ESP 0068:c1elf44.

EIP (extended instruction pointer) has an explanation on Linux Tutorial and more detailed troubleshooting information on Kernal Trap (admittedly this page is a over my head).

These pages seem to indicate that the problem on my desktop might be memory related. As suggested on the Linux Tutorial site, I’ve tried rebooting several times nd have received the same EIP message each time. So it could be a bad SIM. The page says another test to try is to swap out the locations of the SIMs.

I really didn’t want to have to deal with all of this today. I just hope my portable hangs in there until the desktop is fixed. It has also been having fits. The keys periodically don’t work properly (usually the ‘f’ key among others, please pardon any left out letters) and 8 times out of 10 throws a hardware error when booting. Currently the portable is booting, but it’s not recognizing the internal CD-ROM. Glad I have an external USB DVD/CDRW. What a royal pain in the ass.

I’m very thankul that I have the Wolverine 120 gig. I can dump pretty much everything (assuming I can get the drives up). I am going to the store to get different memory sticks. Hopeully the silly things are still made. (sigh) This is going to be one of those days.

I have to leave here within the next 10 minutes to get to the store with enough time. I’m going to pick up replacement RAM and two external cases for the hard drives, just in case everything else fails. I’ll at least be able to retrieve the files.

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