debugging `Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!`

Solution 1:

having the same issue with Trusty (14.04) while trying to solve an unity issue using a solution found on one of the bug's documentation.

Makes me sad to see all this research go to "waste" without even an attempt of an answer. Surely there must be a way to fix this without a fresh install.

I haven't came to a solution yet, but let me share what can be the entry to a solution (part of it thanks to this thread):

1. Create a bootable USB drive with the Ubuntu distro of your preference

2. Select the Try Ubuntu option

3. Make sure your filesystem is usable with e2fsck /dev/your-partition

   • you can get the correct info by running blikd or fdisk -l

4. Mount your partition with sudo mount /dev/your-partition /mnt

   • Get files from disk on Ubuntu livecd?

5. Access your root's env with chroot /mnt

   • How recover from a bad update and no /sbin/init

6. By now you should have full access to your filesystem.
   It's up to you to try to fix or retrieve your data through an USB drive or using rsync

I was stuck trying to rebuild init through sudo apt-get install init

it returned unable to locate package init and as for sudo apt-get update it returned something like

Is there a default init package for ubuntu 14.04?

While trying to download manually, I've found an immense list of init packages here.

The only "init" package i've found is apparently for xenial. Can i use this package to install in trusty?

Still trying to figure out how to make this work. A few more hours until I admit defeat and start backing up my sensitive data before reinstalling from scratch.