Failed boot (was Bash question)

["David Maxey" <onimpulse hotmail com>]

>Ummmm.... Not booting would make it difficult to reinstall anything.
>You say you can't boot.  What exactly do you mean?  What are the
>symptoms of "can't boot up at all"?  If what you say is true, I
>wouldn't worry about installing a shell until after I could boot.
>[Luan L. Tran]  
>
>These are the error message at boot time:
>
>While opening UTMP file: no such file or directory (this line repeats 
many times)
>Init: Id "1" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 mins (the # 1 will 
change to 2,then to 3)
>Init: no more processes left in this runlevel
>
>Then it freezes here.   When I try to ctrl-alt-del, it say:
>
>Shutdown:  warning: cannot open /var/run/shutdown.pid
>Init:  cannot execute "/etc/rc.d/rc"
>
>I try loading as a single-user mode but the same messages appear.

It appears that you have multiple problems, some of which may have
to do with losing /var or maybe some parts of files in /var.  This
is pretty serious.  The file utmp is used to keep track of users
logging in to the system.  It may reside in multiple places,
depending on which Unix you have, but in the case of RHL I believe
it exists in /var/run/utmp.  At any rate, not having things off of
the /var directory will cause your system to crash (as it is doing).
The process 1 that is being referred to is the init process.  It
spawns every other process, regardless of runlevel. The 2 and 3
numbered processes are kflushd and kswapd, respectively.  It seems
that these processes are dying and being restarted (as they will be
automatically if they die).  Trying to boot in single user mode will
not help you.

What you need to do is boot from floppy in order to repair the
damage.  If that does not work, you will have to re-install
Linux.  Do you have rescue disks?  This is something that you should
do when you first install Linux.  From these disks you can mount your
root filesystem and survey the damage.  More information can be
found in the Red Had User's Guide pg. 177-180 (this guide is also
online; section 11.6 is what you're looking for).


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