kernel panic

[bmike1]

I've been fighting with Mint for a while now. I installed mint21 and it runs great for about 5 loads then stuff happens. First it would boot into busybox. I tryed the fsck and that would work sometimes then the kernel began to panic after a week. I would reinstall and the process (busy box.... reinstall) would start over. This has been going on about two weeks. The kernel paniced tonight (it skipped the busybox step) and I finally looked at the output:

initramfs unpacking failed: ZSTD - compressed data is corrupt
Failed to execute /init (error - 2)
Kernel panic - not syncing: No working init found.
Try passing init=option to kernel.

So I ask those who are much smarter than me (you) what all this means.
What init=option could I pass to the kernel? And what about the ZSTD..... data?
What can I do?
You know, now that I think about it this problem coincides with the date of the new release (or at least my update of the system after such). Things that make you go hmmmmmmmm.....

here is the attempt at help when the kernel wasn't panicing:
viewtopic.php?f=49&t=378087&e=1&view=unread#unread

topic moved as no one in the original topic replied after 60 views. maybe I'll get a response here.

[bmike1]

Well, I got some advice but I don't know what to do with it.
--
it seems like the initial ram state when your machine boots is not configured correctly. It is not finding systemd I guess. This is something your package manager should be doing when you upgrade kernel versions. Look up mkinitcpio. I'm only really familiar with this on Arch and maybe gentoo a bit. If this is happening when you upgrade to a new Ubuntu big version number, maybe you consider sticking to the older one for a bit. Don't feel bad about sticking to an LTS kernel if you want.

You can distro hop if you want, but I generally would say if your machine is not stable to just downgrade to an older version if possible. You could go to a distro which has something other than systemd for init, but recognize you will be missing some features (which could probably be done with something else), the daemon services will be written and managed differently, and there are a lot fewer people available for support. Unfortunately, a bit of FLOSSware is written with the assumption you're using systemd. I tried Artix for a hot minute but decided ultimately it wasn't for me because either a) I am dependent on the distributers to maintain their repositories which are often missing packages for configuring daemon services or b) I would be compiling packages for myself and writing my own init scripts.

If you're the only person experiencing this, you're probably doing something wrong or there's something irregular about your existing system.