Friday, December 21, 2007

PANIC: CPU too old for this kernel

I just installed ubuntu 7.10 server on a Virtualbox machine and when I tried to boot it for the first time I got this error, "Panic: CPU too old for this kernel"

Apparently Virtualbox does not support guest PAE.

To fix it I had to boot up to the install cd and go into "rescue a broken system". After going through some hardware detection steps I finally got shell access. From there I ran "apt-get update" and "apt-get install linux-generic" to install the generic linux kernel. After rebooting I had to press the 'Esc' key to get the grub boot menu list. From there I was able choose to boot using the generic kernel. After booting up I modified the /boot/grub/menu.lst file so that it boots using the generic kernel by default.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks pete!
I had the same problem and following your instructions I could install my ubuntu on virtualbox.

RLG said...

Thank you much. I had set up my VM using an ISO image. To boot the already installed VM from this ISO image to run the "rescue" I mounted the ISO file using winimage. I was then able to boot from this mounted image and enter the "rescue" mode. Thanks again!