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Bodhisattva
Joined: 25 Jul 2002
Posts: 1663
Location: Berlin
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 Posted: Mon Nov 04, 2002 11:56 am Post subject: INIT dies miserably |
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*sigh* I'm really not having much luck with my first Mac.  Booting into my Gentoo installation on the 2nd IDE worked just fine, many times. Until today, and it's hard to find out what it is I did to it because I did a lot since the last reboot, install Mac-on-Linux, among other things.
The boot is getting as far as the first message about INIT version 2.0.something, then it throws a screen full of | Code: | | /sbin/rc: /dev/null: ambiguous redirect |
at me and drops me off at a login prompt that most of the times doesn't take a username and a password for an answer and refuses altogether, yet sometimes allows me to log into the middle of nowhere: I can type all the ls and pwd and random commands I can think of, only nothing happens at all, and I mean nothing, I just get the next prompt no matter what I do.
I can still boot from the vmlinux that was on the CD, and mount a drive that looks sort of OKish, but since I don't even know what I'm looking for, I'd appreciate any help. |
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Bodhisattva
Joined: 25 Jul 2002
Posts: 1663
Location: Berlin
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| Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2002 2:23 pm Post subject: |
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Really? Nobody has an idea what may cause this? I've been looking around /etc/init.d, but I can't find any anomalies (assuming I'd know one when I see one  ) and honestly don't know what to look for. If possible I would very much like to avoid a reinstall, this is not the zippiest machine, and I had trouble enough getting the setup right the first time around... |
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Bodhisattva
Joined: 25 Jul 2002
Posts: 1663
Location: Berlin
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| Posted: Fri Nov 08, 2002 4:54 am Post subject: |
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I'll just keep adding to this thread until somebody answers it. Never give up, never surrender. 
Following some good advice I've checked "no video driver" in BootX, and I can now read all the boot messages, which perhaps will make looking for the problem a little saner.
There's the root=/dev/hdb8 kernel option being passed on to BootX. Both /etc/fstab and reality agree that /dev/hdb8 is ext3. Here's what happens then:
| Code: | VFS: mounted root (ext3 filesystem)
Trying to move old root to /initrd ... failed
Unmounting old root
Trying to free ramdisk memory ... ok
Freeing unused kernel memory: 304k init 8k chrp 36k prep
INIT: version 2.84 booting |
Followed by a quick succession of the aforementioned "ambiguous redirect" errors that fill up almost the entire screen before I'm being dropped off at a useless login prompt.
I've discovered that I can have a partly successful reboot using my own kernel (as opposed to the one from the CD) when I disable the tmpfs mount on /dev/shm in /etc/fstab, in which case it fails a little later into the boot and gives me segfaults instead of ambiguous redirects. Once I'm logged in, init 1 and init 3 do exactly the same thing, they segfault (both directions)...
What, pray tell, could have made a perfectly healthy configuration so borked all of a sudden?  |
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Bodhisattva
Joined: 25 Jul 2002
Posts: 1663
Location: Berlin
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| Posted: Fri Nov 08, 2002 12:45 pm Post subject: |
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Looks like I'm back in business. 
I came to realise that it wasn't really normal to get different kernel reactions at different boot stages just by rebooting a lot... Turns out that I had a slightly corrupted filesystem, and a tmpfs mounted twice on mnt/init.d and /dev/shm. So I sticked to the commented tmpfs line in /etc/fstab and e2fsck'ed the drive, resulting in lots of messages about deleted inodes and broken stuff that now resides in lost+found waiting for me to read a book and learn what to do with it.
I've never had a corrupt drive before, sorry about the commotion... Please do go on ignoring me.  |
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