System stopped booting after kernel upgrade and throwing "exec of init (/sbin/init) failed!!!: Accessing a corrupted shared library kernel panic - Not syncing :Attempting to kill init!"

Solution Unverified - Updated -

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Issue

  • Upgraded kernel version from 274 to 308. System was working fine for more than 8 hrs. Later it suddenly crashed & now not booting with following error message:
"exec of init (/sbin/init) failed!!!: Accessing a corrupted shared library kernel panic - Not syncing :Attempting to kill init!"

Panic messges

Resolution

Restore a system from a backup.

A further option is to

  • boot into a rescue system (i.e. install media)
  • mount the filesystems, chroot into it
  • perform "rpm -Va" to find out which RPM contents are corrupted and need to be reinstalled.
    This requires rpm, its dependencies and libraries, as well as the rpm-db to be unharmed.

Root Cause

Unfortunately from the error message, it's not possible to determine which libraries became corrupted.

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