Okay it happened my Linux crashed - Well more like X11 crashed, I had to perform an alt backspace on it as it had frozen up.
Yes I know leaving my system virtually zero disk space to work with is unsound, nevertheless it happened leading to a crash.... Then again it's not like I haven't experienced anything similar in "that other" OS :-) which was the reason 4 switching... Hopefully I can get back to a more normal HDD usage ratio once I get my new computer, but until then I'm stuck with a system that can currently only be accessed via the linux rescue option in RH 9. and I need to get back on track. There is about 70 Mb free on the system currently (there wasn't when the problem occurred) - but I've fixed that in the hope that the problem would evaporate in a puff of logic - but alas it was not to be... My problem is that every time I'm trying start Linux - and I get to the login prompt the machine orbits. (The login sequence goes into a repeating loop). Normally I'm booting directly into x so in theory the graphic log in screen should appear but instead the following happens... login appears (the terminal version) If I do nothing the screen goes blank a few seconds - then the login prompt appears again. No matter if I act immediately or if I do it after a few loops if I'm really fast I can manage to type in the regular username but not the password - they're too long :-). But before getting around to typing the password the screen goes blank and after a while the machine either re-asks for the login user name or the password. To beat the machine speed wise I've also tried to add a user that has only a one digit/chr name and a one digit/chr password - so I can theoretically manage to type both usr and pwd and press ENTER before the machine loops but in every case it just loops and loops endlessly even though I have time to type both usr name and pwd. How does one get out of such a predicament? I have access to the system files etc. via the rescue option and can edit files etc. via the edit interface of the Midnight Commander. When I attempt starting X from the rescue option the following takes place: startx hostname:localhost.localdomain;hostname lookup failure using authority file //:Xauthority writing file //Xauthority Fatal server error cannot open log file /var/log/XFree86.0.log I was then asked to contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] - (we'll I guess this is it :-) Then I get the following error message xinit: no such file or directory (errno2): unable to connect to x server xinit: no sucg process (errno3) server error I've also tried to type login at the prompt in rescue mode to see if I could force a log in as another user once the machine was up and running in rescue mode and got the following error message: Kernel panic: VFS : unable to mount FS on 48:05 So no luck there. I would prefer not having to remove everything X as I am not enough into the file structuring RPM installing / uninstalling etc. to be able to do so without having to worry about some of the data/programs still not backed properly up as I had no chance to do so before X crashed and about the process of finding and reintegrating external programs I have installed after X was originally installed. But that's perhaps not an issue??? Anybody got any suggestions to what I could do to get X up and running? :scratch: ____________________________________________________________ Get advanced SPAM filtering on Webmail or POP Mail ... Get Lycos Mail! http://login.mail.lycos.com/r/referral?aid=27005 _______________________________________________ XFree86 mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xfree86
