From: "Avery, Brian" I passed init=/mylinuxrc to the kernel on the command line. The kernel silently dropped down to exec /sbin/init. It turned out that /mylinuxrc had improper permissions. Without any warning message from the kernel that something was wrong it took awhile to find the issue. The patch below adds a warning. Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton --- init/main.c | 7 ++++--- 1 files changed, 4 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) diff -puN init/main.c~add-init=-warning-to-init-mainc init/main.c --- 25-alpha/init/main.c~add-init=-warning-to-init-mainc 2005-07-30 17:22:12.000000000 -0700 +++ 25-alpha-akpm/init/main.c 2005-07-30 17:22:12.000000000 -0700 @@ -708,10 +708,11 @@ static int init(void * unused) * The Bourne shell can be used instead of init if we are * trying to recover a really broken machine. */ - - if (execute_command) + if (execute_command) { run_init_process(execute_command); - + printk(KERN_WARNING "Failed to execute %s. Attempting " + "defaults...\n", execute_command); + } run_init_process("/sbin/init"); run_init_process("/etc/init"); run_init_process("/bin/init"); _