Lately I updated Windows on my notebook, from 8 to 8.1. On the same machine there was also Slackware which installation has been really painful thanks to UEFI; you can imagine my face when on reboot I got:
Kernel panic - not syncinc: No init found.
Carefully looking I’ve been able to catch an elilo error in the few milliseconds before Slackware boot:
elilo.c(line 276):
ExitBootSvcs: failed, memory map has changed.
elilo.c(line 279): Main_Loop: Retrying.... have to rebuild boot params
Actually this just driven me far from the solution, it was much more trivial.
Windows update have just changed the partition numeration, so at startup Linux tried to mount its root and swap from the wrong partition; unfortunately this was not so clear from the error that I got. I found it out just by accident.
Solution is pretty trivial, you just have to edit your etc/fstab with the right partitions numbers.
You can do with a live distribution, check partition with lsblk, mount the root and edit the previous file.
Or just by trial and error, boot with root=/dev/sdaX until you get a shell where you can edit fstab. My partition numeration has an offset of -1, probably some partition has been moved or deleted.
Obviously such problem doesn’t really depend on which distro you have, what may change is the solution, you should check everywhere you directly reference to partitions.
