So, last week or so I had just spent another day reinstalling dietpi on my raspberry pi 2 because it had for no apparent reason stopped responding to ssh although samba was working, and when I plugged it into a monitor and keyboard and hard-rebooted it, it gave me a “end kernel panic - not syncing” message on boot. So yeah, I tried to google the messages I got and everything, but in the end I had to reformat the sd-card. Took a while, but eventually I got everything working and configured and running smoothly.
Now the other day, I suddenly couldn’t access it over samba. I could access the pi using ssh, so I ran a reboot command, and that was that. Now it wouldn’t boot back up again. Plugged in monitor and keyboard. No signal on monitor. Hard-reset the pi, now I get “end kernel panic - not syncing - Attempted to kill init ! exit code 0x00007f00”. Googled the error and got some scattered linux/ubuntu hits but no definitive answer on what it meant or how to fix it.
I love dietpi and my rpi2 when it’s working, but all this hassle of having to reinstall it over and over whenever it suddenly decides to stop working is not worth it. How can I find out what is wrong and fix it, preferably permanently? How can I scroll up the kernel panic message or see the log files and how can I repair a failing boot? Does booting from a usb repair distro of some sort work with the pi or is there some key combination I can hold down to get into some kind of recovery mode?