[plug] problem booting

[David & Lisa Buddrige]

Hi all,

Today when I turned on my computer, rather than booting as it normally does,
it came  up with the following error.

    INIT: version 2.83 booting
    INIT: No inittab file found
    INIT: can't open (/etc/ioctl.save, O_WRONLY): Input/output error

    Enter runlevel:

I did a search on the internet, but while it brought up others with a
similar problem, there were no solutions that I could find.  One guy
suggested entering a runlevel of "single" so as to get a very basic shell,
but this didn't work - it just brought up the prompt "Enter runlevel:"
again.

I don't know why this has happened - it was working fine previously.  Could
this be some kind of hardware failure?

I am running Mandrake 9.0.

thanks heaps for any assistance

David.  8-)