Re: need help with figuring out why kernel does not boot

[Adam Williams <awilliam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>I'm currently running redHat linux 6.2. I would like to
>run linux 2.3.99-pre7 instead. I configured the kernel

May we ask why?  If you NEED a feature not in 2.2.x I'd suggest either a 
backport or using one of the 2.4.x-testXX kernels (the latest should be 
relatively stable).  That (2.3.99) vintage of kernel are quite old now, 
and the modules API may have changed since then.

>parameters and built the os from the source code, but
>the system does not boot. Unfortunately, I can't figure
>out what caused the problem because the boot messages fly off
>the screen too fast. What's left on the screen are a bunch
>of numbers followed by the following lines:
>Code: 8b 56 1c 89 d0 85 d2 7d 06 8d 82 ff 7f 00 00 25 00 25 00 00 ff ff
>Aiee, killing interrupt handler
>Kernel panic: Attempted to kill idle task!
>In interrupt handler - not syncing

This really looks like a device driver failure, or a disk management 
issue.

>When I reboot with my old redHat kernel, I don't find any
>of the earlier boot messages in any of the files in /var/log.
>How do I capture those messages to figure out why the kernel
>does not want to boot.

That's because it probably hasn't mounted the filesystem yet.