John -- I think your focus on the "respawn" problem has distracted you from
your real problem, one of filesystem corruption. Because I wrote the
following responses as I worked my way through your answer, I don't touch on
this until the end.
And BTW, you forgot to Cc: the linux-newbie list in your response. I'm
adding it back in.
At 12:50 AM 2/2/00 -0700, John Starkey wrote [in part]:
>I think this is what you want:
>
>l0:0:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 0
>
>there are 6 of these lines, each number substituted by it's number (0-6
>respectively)
>
>then there is this:
>
>1:2345:respawn/sbin/mingetty tty1
>
>and there are 6 of these lines with the number fields (except for 2345)
>substituted :} with it's respective number.
Actually it's the second of these I wanted to see. The 1-6 at the beginning
of these lines are the same numbers that "init" is using to identify the
respawning lines.
>> whether you can find the process listed in the inittab lines above
>> (it might be getty, agetty, mgetty, mingetty, getty_ps)
>> with the "which" command
>
>Wow, this is the smallest ps ax I've seen so far. Only 8 entries. init [3],
>[kflushd], [kupdate], [kpiod], [kswapd], [mdrecoveryd]. Then bash and ps ax. I
>hope this answers your question.
Not "ps ax" -- "which". This is a command similar to find, but that looks in
your PATH for an executable with the name you mention. IF you enter "which
mingetty", I'll bet you don't find one.
So ... what has *probably* happened is that, for some reason, mingetty is
missing from your system. Hence "init" tries to start it, fails, and
(because that's what the "respawn" keyword specifies) tries again, until the
built-in "circuit-breaker" clicks in and you get the message you are seeing.
>The one thing I didn't mention. It drops me down to "enter password for
>maintenance" and fdisk when I reboot. I'm moving a bunch of cards between boxes
>right now. But when I get to fdisk I have no idea what I need to do. I remember
>it saying something about a bad inode I think.
"fdisk"? might it be "fsck"? This (maintenance mode) means the system finds
some problem with your filesystem during the boot/init process. Without
seeing the "something" it says, I can't be more specific. But init may be
failing to find mingetty due to filesystem corruption. Try running "e2fsck
/dev/hda1" (replace hda1 with the right designator for your root filesystem)
and see if that helps. Or port again reporting the details of what happens
during these unsuccessful boots.
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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