Ack, I can't boot, and I can't figure out the problem. Any help is appreciated; even if you don't want to read to the end of the message, at least some hints on where to find docs will help (no, I can't read linux man pages).
Symptom is that when I boot, I get something like (I had to write it down): INIT: version 2.71 booting INIT: Entering runlevel: 2 Debian GNU Linux 1.3 (none) tty1 (none) login: Note that none of my boot scripts were run... When I log in as root, with the correct password, I get: <some date> login[8] unable to change tty '/dev/tty1' for user 'root' Unable to change tty /dev/tty1: Bad file number I can't figure out what's going wrong. If I Ctrl-Alt-Del, it won't reboot, but instead asks me for a root password like it's trying to go to single-user mode (this may be a debian feature, I don't know). I have to push the reset button in order to reboot. If I try to boot with 'single' as a parameter, again it asks for a root password (some security feature?), but when I give the correct password, it says "Entering runlevel: 2", rather than going into single user mode. (my guess is that it tried, but then the shell failed, and it assumed it was time to go to multi user mode). Finally, using the rescue disk, I changed inittab to have tty6 run: bash -i < /dev/tty6 > /dev/tty6 2>&1 But then when I rebooted, it said something like respawning too fast, disabled for 5 minutes. That's odd, because that sort of command worked just fine with one rescue disk using 'ash'. If there's some sort of way to properly have a shell run without using a rescue disk, I'd like to know how (so I can test various commands, devices, etc; using a rescue disk doesn't tell me anything, as it boots just fine) Fsck found some problems but fixed them. I've tried rebooting with older kernels too. Any ideas on which binaries may be bad: init, getty, login? Any idea where to ftp these, without them being in a .deb package? Would my libc be bad? (This all started when I was having trouble with dselect. I had installed a downlevel version of 'dpkg', and was futzing around with dselect; I used the 'unstable' variety, so I could use 2.1.x kernels, but had not had any problems, and had rebooted many times since using last using dselect. Today, dselect couldn't find the 'unstable' directory, and when I checked manually, I noticed the new 1.3.1.r3 thingy, and ftp'd and installed dpkg from there, as the readme said. I did not touch the libc stuff. Noticing that it actually downgraded dpkg, I tried to get the old version back. Then dselect started having core dumps, which were traced to the dpkg-ftp 'setup' package, which croaked on line 137 (or 135?) when trying to open the ftp connection. The *only* packages I had touched were perl, perl-debug, dpkg, and dpkg-ftp. In frustration, I rebooted, but it never came back up.) -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
