/dev is zapped

[Rick Stevens]

John Reynolds wrote:
> I have a Dell runing RedHat 7.1.  I do not know the history of what 
> happened, but during boot it fails with 'Unable to open initial console". 
> Booting with my trusty Tom's Root-boot floppy, I find that /dev/ is almost 
> empty; there are a few directories like ptys, but console, mouse,  all the 
> disks, etc are AWOL.
> 
> I'm only guessing how /dev got blitzed, but frankly I don't care that 
> much; the primary problem is how to force the system to re-create the /dev 
> entries during bootup.  A quick exam of manpages and the archives didn't 
> suggest anything.  I toyed with the idea of getting a dump of /dev on a 
> similar system and restoring it, but the odds are good that the device IDs 
> wouldn't match, and then I'm in it even deeper.

Try booting in rescue mode if possible, then reinstall the dev RPM from
your CDs.  I probably still have a copy of it somewhere if you can't
find yours.

By the way, 7.1 has been dead for well over two years and as far as I
know, there is no active support for it.  You really should upgrade to
Fedora Core 1 or 2.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
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-     Try to look unimportant.  The bad guys may be low on ammo.     -
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