It would help to know (a) the exact wording of the error messages and (b)
what runlevel you normally boot into (text consoles or xdm). Also, can you
boot into single-user mode?
And I'm not clear on "mounted or unmounted" -- do you mean you can't see
which is says before the screen goes blank, or some such problem? This
leaves me unsure as to whether the failure is occurring before or after the
system runs e2fsck on the root filesystem in ro mode.
If you can boot with an "emergency boot" disk (by which I mean one that
loads a kernel but uses your hard disk Linux partition as the root
filesystem; I forget what RH calls them), I'd check the two likely sources
of the problem:
1. Is /etc/inittab corrupted?
2. Are the /dev/tty* files that the consoles attach to okay?
If you can't boot with an "emergency boot" disk, I'd try booting with some
rescue disk that is entirely independent of the hard disk's filesystem (on
Slackware, you can do this with a bootdisk/rootdisk combo; on RH, I'm not
sure; or you could try a specialized disk set like tomsrtbt or trinux),
mount the hard disk partition by hand, and perform the same checks.
At 12:27 AM 2/7/99 -0500, Akintayo Holder wrote:
>My RH 5.2 box stopped dual booting this afternoon, it gives an error
>message saying it is unable to open initial console. This comes just
>after the message saying it has mounted or unmounted the original root.
>
>Does anyone know what is the cause and how to fix this.
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
762 Garland Drive
Palo Alto, CA 94303-3603
650.321.3561 voice 650.322.1209 fax [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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