This is not the normal "black screen"issue and I was shocked to eventually find out why. The normal advice of reconfiguring Xorg didn't work. Even booting into "Recovery Mode" did not help. Here is the short end of the stick that fixed it: sudo apt-get install mdm mate-desktop-environment Yes you got it right, mdm and the mate-desktop-environment / gnome were somehow uninstalled. This must be whe........

Iam not sure why this is happening neither the hostnode or VM changed. All I did was reboot the hostnode and startup the Centos VM again, also note it happened with the original kernel on the VM and also the latest 6.9 kernel as of this writing as shown below. Host Node: Centos 6.9 Kernel:2.6.32-696.6.3.el6.x86_64 Kernel: 2.6.32-042stab123.9 Same result in any kernel above........

Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init! Pid: 1, comm: init Not tained: 3.2.51-3.el6.x86_64 #1 Call Trace: panic+0x8c/0x1a2 forget_original_parent+0x34d/0x360 exit_notify+0x12/0x140 do_exit+0x1d8/0x400 do_group_exit_+0x50/0xc0 sys_exit_group+0x12/0x20 system_call_fastpath+0x16/0x1b panic occurred, switching back to text console........

Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init! Pid: 1,comm: init Tained: G I------------- 2.6.32-358.el6.x86_64 #1 Call Trace: [] ? panic+0xa0/0x16f [] ? do_exit+0x862/0x870 [] ? fput+0x25/0x30 [] ? do_group_exit+0x58/0xd0 [] ? sys_exit_........