kernel panic - not syncing : attempted to kill init!

Question

yes this problem might have been reported and solved for a lot of people on the Internet but i haven't found anyone who is running their Ubuntu 12.04 from a USB drive. i crashed my hard disk a long time ago and now am running Ubuntu from a USB drive since a few months. i have rebooted and booted a lot of times. i had to update the source file because i could not open software center, i have restarted after that as well.

now am facing this error :

 kernel panic - not syncing : attempted to kill init! 

' panic occurred, switching back to text console ' and a lot of other text and error before that. i recently ran a few softwares on wine but didn't work ( i think that might have to do something with the error ).

Please let me know what i can do. i have a few important documents on the drive but i can not copy them from the USB because well i don't know where on earth it stores it. i even tried searching the file names but it did not work. please look at the photo for the errors.

Solution

Into rescue mode,use the CD-ROM

bash-3.2#fdisk -l

bash-3.2#mkdir /mnt/sysimage
    bash-3.2#mount /dev/sda1  /mnt/sysimage
    bash-3.2#cd /mnt/sysimage
    bash-3.2#ls


    bash-3.2#grub
    grub> root (hd0,0)
    grub> setup (hd0)

then reboot

into grub shell:

    grub> root (hd0,0)

    grub> kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-194.el5 ro root=/dev/sda2

    grub> initrd /initrd-2.6.18-194.el5.img

    grub> boot

Comments

[WindowsEscapist]

For future reference, files in a persistent USB drive are stored in a file called "casper-rw" at the base directory of the flash drive (there is a virtual ext4 filesystem inside the file).