[plug] problem booting

[Craig Ringer]

On Wed, 2004-01-28 at 21:17, David & Lisa Buddrige wrote:
> 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.

There's a chance your root filesystem is f**ed or the wrong FS is being
mounted as root. Try booting the kernel with the argument
'init=/bin/bash' and see if you can get to a prompt. If so, you can
investigate the problem further. I suggest booting from a rescue disk
and fscking the filesystems too.

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

It could easily be a dying disk, or bad luck with cache/memory errors.

Craig Ringer