I have two identical Asus EeePC netbooks that are both installed with Ubuntu. One of them was sitting on the closet shelf and the battery went completely dead. When I charged the battery and tried to boot the it, I got the "No init found" error. In trying to follow the suggested way to fix it posted here, I used the Startup Disk Creator on my Ubuntu 11.10 desktop machine to create a USB stick with a bootable Ubuntu 11.10 live CD on it (the netbook doesn't have a CD drive).

I plugged the USB stick into the netbook with the init issues, went into the BIOS and selected the USB stick as the 1st choice to boot from, and did a hard restart. It then just stuck at the flashing underscore. Not knowing why it wasn't working, I tried booting my working netbook from the USB stick. When I got into the BIOS on the working netbook, I noticed the description in the boot order section for the USB device was different.

On the non-working netbook, the description was SWISSBIT (the name of the USB stick) but on the working netbook it was just "Rem. Drive". I also noticed on the working netbook there was an additional option under the bootable order section that allowed me to choose which hard drive to boot from. This section showed two hard drives, one of them being my USB stick. So, rather than changing the device boot order, I selected the USB stick as the hard drive to boot from first and it worked like a champ - I was able to boot into the LiveCD on the USB stick.

Seems to me the working netbook is seeing the LiveCD USB stick as a hard drive, where-as the non-working netbook is seeing it as a plain ol' USB stick. The BIOS is the exact same version on both netbooks... any idea why it works on one and not on the other?