R: R: R: R: Partitioning (ex: Installing Fedora on RH9 (newbie))

Andrew Kelly akelly at transparency.org
Thu Mar 4 12:28:29 UTC 2004


On Thu, 2004-03-04 at 13:06, Ninux wrote:
> Sorry, Andy, I'm a beginner!
> 
> what does "You have to boot to single user (or init 1)" mean?

It mean you have to boot the machine into single user mode and log in as
root.

You can do this by passing parameters to the boot loader, for instance,
in the case of LILO, when the prompt is issued (boot:) hit the tab
button to interrupt the boot process and see a list of possible images
to boot. Your machine will very likely only have 1 and it will probably
be called linux. presuming this is the case, you would type linux after
the boot prompt, followed by a space, followed by either the word
single, or the number 1. It would look like this:
boot: Linux single
or
boot: Linux 1

There are more than just these 2 examples, but these are sufficient.

This will then boot you to root shell and you will be asked for the root
password. You are now in single user mode (sometimes also called
maintenance mode).

Single user mode is also runlevel 1 (hence the 1 parameter to the
bootloader). You can also reach this runlevel from a "fully booted"
machine. Just boot your box as you normally do and login as root. Then
issue the command init 1 (or telinit 1, check man pages). This will then
change your runlevel from (generally) either 3 or 5, to runlevel 1.

This is the level at which you would run parted.


Now, that having been said...
please don't take this as an insult because that's certainly not how
it's meant, but, if you are not familiar enough with a *nix box to know
what single user mode is, you really have no business manipulation
partitions on active root filesystems.
You can certainly learn a lot playing around at that level, but you
should only be doing so on a system that could drop dead without you
being bothered by it.
A couple of unattended keystrokes and you've lost everything, so don't
go at it lightly.

Andy





More information about the Redhat-install-list mailing list