[plug] problem booting

[Cameron Patrick]

David & Lisa Buddrige wrote:

|     INIT: No inittab file found

Ouch.  That would be your problem then.  See if you can grab a copy of
some other Mandrake 9 user's /etc/inittab and stick it on a floppy or
something similar.

| 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.

You should be able to boot using "linux init=/bin/sh" at the lilo prompt
(or something similar - I'm not sure how Mandrake sets up their boot
loader).

That'll get you into a very primitive shell with your drive mounted
read-only.  Then you can do something like:

	$ devfsd
	$ mount / -o remount,rw		(enable read-write access)
	$ modprobe floppy	(make sure the floppy driver is	in the kernel)

(insert the floppy or whatever with inittab on it)
	$ mount /dev/fd0 /mnt -t vfat -o ro
	$ cp /mnt/inittab /etc/inittab
	$ umount /mnt
	$ mount / -o remount,ro		(mount read-only again)
	$ sync
(hit the reset switch and hope everything boots up as normal next time)

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

I've no idea.  Could be due to file system corruption of some sort...

Cameron.