boot messages overwritten by run level 3 login

[Luciano Miguel Ferreira Rocha]

On Sat, May 08, 2004 at 03:26:30PM -0400, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook wrote:
> 
> Hi I've just had to relocate my FC1 to a different partition. I used
> tar...  Then I edited the new fedora's /etc/fstab & /etc/lilo.conf & a
> few scripts. 
> 
> FC1 booted successfully in it's new home. Everything seams to be working
> correctly (so far).
> 
> But just before the runlevel 3 boot prompt there are a few warning
> messages I don't get time to read before the boot prompt steps on them. 
> No problem I thinks. <shift>+<page up> But while most of the boot screen
> messages are there, the error messages I'm looking for which were near
> the bottom are not there. 
> 
> I searched the archive for boot + log. But all it told me about was the
> dmesg command and of course var/log/* But nothing in var/log (including
> dmesg seems to have the same exact text as was printed to the console.
> I'm sure that the data in the logs is probably considered more
> significant. But I sometimes see errors there that do NOT appear in the
> /var/log logs. I'm thinking that this output is not saved to a log by
> default.
> 
> I'd like to know if there is something I can do to cause this exact text
> to actually be logged someplace???  or if there is a way to stop the login
> prompt from clearing the last screenful of the boot screen messages???

The startup of services is recorded in /var/log/messages. As the syslog
service takes a little time to start, and it isn't start first, some
messages from the kernel and the starting services get mixed up, but they
should be all there.

Or, if you don't want to search in log messages, comment the following
line in /etc/inittab and reboot:

1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1

(to: #1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1)

You won't be able to loggin in the first console, but the rest are still
available (switch to the second by pressing alt+f2).

If you're satisfied, you don't need to reboot after restoring the inittab
line. Just run "telinit q".

Regards,
Luciano Rocha