[vox-tech] linux boot failed

[Ken Bloom]

On Thursday 24 August 2006 00:15, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> On Wed 23 Aug 06,  8:58 PM, Hai Yi <yihai2004 at gmail.com> said:
> > Hello,
> >
> > My debian Linux had been running fine until one day when I
> > restarted the computer, it failed to boot. The error message is as
> > follows:
> >
> > ....
> > INIT: version 2.86 booting
> > INIT: No inittab file found
> >
> > Enter runlevel:
> >
> > I didnt know what I should enter and stuck at this stage.
> >
> > Can anyone help so I dont re-install the whole thing? :-)

Unless you screwed up deleting stuff somewhere on your disk, I'd guess 
that the disk needs to be fscked, not that I expect that will actually 
fix the problem, because a missing inittab will appear in /lost+found 
with the inode number as its name, rather than reappearing 
as /etc/inittab.

Mount the disk after booting with a boot disk, see whether the disk 
needs to be fscked, and see whether /etc/inittab is there, and also see 
whether other important stuff (for 
example /etc/passwd,/etc/shadow,etc...) is missing. If there isn't lots 
of important stuff missing, let us know what distribution you're 
running. Someone here may be able to provide the 
appropriate /etc/inittab.

> Hello, Hai.
>
> Try entering "1".   What happens?

Is simply typing "1" do anything? I've never seen this situation before, 
so I didn't know that you could change runlevel by pressing a key. 
Runlevel 1 isn't "required" to be single user mode. That's runlevel "S" 
(or "s") which may have some kind of hardcoded thing to do the 
appropriate single user thing.

A good solution to get into your system without using a boot disk would 
be to reboot and give the kernel parameter init=/bin/busybox (or 
failing that init=/bin/bash).

> When the boot messages scroll, do you see any messages saying that /
> is being mounted?

If it couldn't mount /, you'd see a kernel panic.

--Ken

-- 
Ken Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/
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