[plug] problem booting

[David & Lisa Buddrige]

Thanks Craig, Cameron,

I managed to boot into a simple shell by using the "linux init=/bin/bash"
option at the lilo prompt.  I then attempted to find out what was going on
in /etc.... here is a transcript of my attempt:

init-2.05b# ls /etc
ls: /etc: Input/output error
init-2.05b# cd /etc
init: cd: etc: Input/output error
init-2.05b# cd /home
init-2.05b# ls
buddrid
init-2.05b#

so I thought to my self... ugh... not good.  perhaps there's something wrong
with the /etc inode?

Perhaps I'll just try and get off some critical files incase I need to do
drastic surgery....

So I attempted to do a

mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /floppy

which resulted in an error.

I did an ls on /dev which resulted in:

init-2.05b# ls /dev
console    discs    ide    md    null    pts    raw    root.old    tty
vcc
cpu            fb         initrd  mem port  pty     rd      shm    urandom
zero
cua            full        kmem   misc ptmx  random  root tts  vc
init-2.05b#

So I think to myself... ugh... not good.... where's my devices gone?   Is
this a Mandrake thing?  In RH /dev/fd0 was always the floppy but there does
not seem to be such a thing in my /dev

has anyone seen this sort of thing before?

thanks heaps for any assistance

David.

-----Original Message-----
From: Craig Ringer <craig at postnewspapers.com.au>
To: Perth Linux User Group <plug at plug.linux.org.au>
Date: Wednesday, 28 January 2004 10:01
Subject: Re: [plug] problem booting


>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
>
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