Re: Help - I hosed myself!

[Jens Kerle <jkerle gmx de>]

Hi Karen,

you would need to pass parameter at lilo prompt. But which ?
better solution would be a rescue disk, which runs by itself, and not boot
into the sticky system
get a rescue disk from freshmeat.net -> minidistributions
or my favorite, the debian rescue disk (i know, this is redhat list:)


cu, Jens

> I suddenly can't boot, even off a floppy, and I need help.  I know it's
> my
> fault, and what I need to fix it is on the hard drive, but if I can't
> boot I
> can't get to it.  Let me explain a little.
> 
> I am trying to set up a "standby" server to replace either of two others
> if
> they go down (like a hardware failure or something).  I have wonderful
> cron-ed scripts to ftp-get the contents of important directories (the
> key
> one that is relevent to my question is /etc in its entirety)
> periodically,
> storing them in /var/mirror, and those scripts are working fine.  I then
> built two more scripts to run in the case of wanting to employ the
> standby
> as one of the real ones.  For example, there is a directory
> /var/mirror/lex
> that has copies of /etc, /home, and /var/log from the server called lex.
> The script standby2lex(theoretically) moves /etc, /home, and /var/log to
> /var/mirror/standby, and then moves the stored ones from /var/mirror/lex
> into the real places.  I had tested it with non-critical directories,
> and
> there were no bugs that I could find.  So holding my breath I tested the
> real script.  Dummy me - I didn't check to see that everything was in
> place
> before rebooting.  Instead of booting successfully as lex, which I
> expected,
> the boot sequence (after some initial stuff that works okay) says:
>    ...other stuff - no errors so far...
>    INIT: cannot execute "/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit"
>    INIT: Entering runlevel: 3
>    INIT: cannot execute "/etc/rc.d/rc"
>    INIT: Id "1" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
>    INIT: Id "2" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
>    INIT: Id "3" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
>    INIT: Id "4" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
>    INIT: Id "5" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
>    INIT: Id "6" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
>    INIT: no more processes left in this runlevel
> ..and then re-attempts the Id spawning things every five minutes ad
> infinitum.  Nothing short of the power button has any effect.  I
> thought,
> "No sweat - I'll boot from the emergency floppy I made when I installed
> Linux," I thought (although I had never done that before).  But when I
> try
> that, and type "rescue" when prompted to, it first says it is loading
> rescue, and does some other stuff, and then says:
>    VFS: Insert root floppy disk to be loaded into RAM disk and press
> ENTER
> I assumed that the same floppy serves as the "root floppy", and so I
> pressed
> ENTER, and it said:
>    RAMDISK: ext2 filesystem found at block 0
>    RAMDISK: Loading 1440 blocks [1 disk] into ram disk...
>    autodetecting RAID arrays
>    autorun ...
>    ... autorun DONE.
>    VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
>    Freeing unused kernel memory: 64k freed
>    Warning: unable to open an initial console.
>    Kernel panic: No init found.  Try passing init= option to kernel.
> 
> Eh?  The keyboard does not appear to do anything (at least it doesn't
> echo,
> and Ctrl-Alt-Del doesn't work), so how would I pass an option to the
> kernel?
> And if I knew how to do that, what value would I set init to - the
> suspected
> location of my /etc directory?  Even though I can't see the disk, I'm
> pretty
> confident of the location of at least one if not two usable /etc
> directories, if I can just get to them somehow and mv one of them back
> to
> /etc.
> 
> Any ideas on how I can get my machine back, short of reinstalling Linux?
> 
> --------------------------------
> Karen Ellrick
> S & C Technology, Inc.
> 1-21-35 Kusatsu-shinmachi
> Hiroshima  733-0834  Japan
> (from U.S. 011-81, from Japan 0) 82-293-2838
> --------------------------------
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Jens Kerle
Technical University Heilbronn
jkerle fh-heilbronn de