A case of panic

[Timothy Murphy]

I had the panic below on a laptop running Fedora-4,
and am wondering what is the best way to repair the system;
and in particular if there is anything short of re-installation
that would be likely to solve the problem.

I should say that there doesn't seem to be anything wrong 
with the machine itself, as grub brings up Windows fine.

Here is the panic;
any advice on a solution gratefully received.

All goes well until:
-----------------------------------------
kjournal starting, Commit interval 5 seconds
EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
Switching to new root
ERROR opening /dev/console!!!!: 2
error dup2'ing fd of 0 to 0
error dup2'ing fd of 0 to 1
error dup2'ing fd of 0 to 2
unmounting old /proc
unmounting old /sys
exec of init (/sbin/init) failed!!!!: 2
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!
 [<c0127ba8>] panic+0x45/0x1b4
 [<c012a505>] profile_task_exit+0x35/0x40
 [<c012dc3f>] do_exit+0x76b/0x942
 [<c012df6d>] do_group_exit+0x12b/0x349
 [<c0189f56>] sys_munmap+0x50/0x68
 [<c0104465>] syscall_call+0x7/0xb
-----------------------------------------

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland