Digital Ocean Server Recovery
Budget: £18 – £36 GBP
Hi there, I’ve received the following information from support for a digital ocean server which is not working correctly. I believe this is because it’s built for an older system/droplet (~2014-2018) so the file it’s trying to boot from is incorrect - would you be able to provide a quote for fixing this issue, many thanks. Support message below:
I understand that you are not able to connect to the Droplet. The Droplet appears to be stuck during the boot process, halting with the following error: 'kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!'.
The init process ( binary ) is called by the kernel to pass control into managing the system above the kernel. The error shown indicates that the system has a bad environment. Any search for “attempted to kill init” or “missing /sbin/init” will bring up many threads related to the scenarios associated with this.
The Droplet boots up properly, and the system passes control to the boot loader. This finds the kernel, which loads and then attempts to kick off the init system; the first process on the system that finishes the boot up. In this situation, the init binary is not working or is corrupted. The only way to recover this in place would be to ensure that:
1) the Droplet’s filesystem is properly intact.
2) the init binary is properly installed
3) the grub legacy or grub 2 (whichever applies) correctly references init.
On many modern systems, this is called systemd, but older systems may be different. Issues can be caused by file system problems, bad updates, or broken grub configurations/updates. There isn't any action on the platform that can resolve this case, so the best option, if you aren’t fully versed in this type of issue, will be to extract the data through the recovery environment and redeploy on a working system or recovery from a working Snapshot/Backup where available.
I'm sorry! I don't have better news on this for you, but we do want to offer you any guidance you need on moving forward with this. You can learn more about the recovery environment option here:
https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/droplets/resources/recovery-iso/
I understand that you are not able to connect to the Droplet. The Droplet appears to be stuck during the boot process, halting with the following error: 'kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!'.
The init process ( binary ) is called by the kernel to pass control into managing the system above the kernel. The error shown indicates that the system has a bad environment. Any search for “attempted to kill init” or “missing /sbin/init” will bring up many threads related to the scenarios associated with this.
The Droplet boots up properly, and the system passes control to the boot loader. This finds the kernel, which loads and then attempts to kick off the init system; the first process on the system that finishes the boot up. In this situation, the init binary is not working or is corrupted. The only way to recover this in place would be to ensure that:
1) the Droplet’s filesystem is properly intact.
2) the init binary is properly installed
3) the grub legacy or grub 2 (whichever applies) correctly references init.
On many modern systems, this is called systemd, but older systems may be different. Issues can be caused by file system problems, bad updates, or broken grub configurations/updates. There isn't any action on the platform that can resolve this case, so the best option, if you aren’t fully versed in this type of issue, will be to extract the data through the recovery environment and redeploy on a working system or recovery from a working Snapshot/Backup where available.
I'm sorry! I don't have better news on this for you, but we do want to offer you any guidance you need on moving forward with this. You can learn more about the recovery environment option here:
https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/droplets/resources/recovery-iso/