Hangs on startup at Remote printing

[frankie70]

As a complete Unix newbie I am hoping for your patience.

I am mostly a Windows man with a little bit of Linux experience and have been asked to look at a machine that will not boot up.

It enters Init2 and gets to:

"Remote printing starting lpd" and then just hangs. There is only one printer connected and just really need some help and advice as to where to start and how to solve this problem?

Any help would be hugely appreciated and in simple terms please.

 

[motoslide]

Do you know which version of SCO?
You may need to enter System Maintenance mode (enter the root password when prompted on screen), then look through the startup scripts to see where it might be failing.
I have SCO systems with Remote Printing enabled, but they do not display the phrase you reference while booting.
As a starting point, enter System Maintenance mode, then run this command:
# grep "Remote printing" /etc/rc*.d/*
# grep "Remote printing" /etc/init.d/*

Newer versions of SCO OpenServer will normally continue booting after a 2-minute timeout if one of the /etc/rc2.d scripts doesn't complete. Make sure you wait at least that long before giving up.

"Proof that there is intelligent life in Oregon. Well, Life anyway.

 

[frankie70]

Thanks motoslide.

I'm pretty sure it's on old version as it's been running on the machine for at least 5 years according to one of the guys who works for the company where the machine is located.

The machine appears to be an old 486 66mhz with 40mb RAM, so I would imagine it's a pretty old version of SCO.

It does loads of scanning whilst going through the boot procedure and says that there are problems with /dev/user1, /dev/user2 and /dev/user3 and that it can't mount them. Could it be a hard drive problem perhaps??? What is in /dev/user1 etc??

Thanks

 

[edfair]

uname -X will identify the version.

/dev/userx identify partitions on a hard drive. Or on 3 hard drives.

l /dev/hd* (L) will show the hard drives as hd00 (or hd0root) depending on version as boot drive hd1* hd2* and so forth. 8 entries if I recall for each hard drive.

You can then divvy /dev/hd** to see the partitioning.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[motoslide]

We're really shooting in the dark on this one. You might be the proud owner of a box running SCO 4.x. It would be helpful to get that O/S version (as suggested by Ed). You'll have to get it booted first, of course. Were you able to enter "System Maintenance Mode"? You have to be watching the screen carefully during the bootup process to get there.
First are the standard BIOS messages.
Then, the boot: prompt.
After that, you should see some O/S startup messages. At some point, the system will (should?) display a table listing the hardware devices. It's right after that point where a prompt will ask you something similar to:

Press CNTL-D for normal bootup.
Or, type the root password to enter System Maintenance mode.

You may only have a few seconds (this is configurable) before it will default to running multi-user.

It sounds like you've got some disk problems. Whether they are physical or logical can't be determined from the information provided. The fact that your system hangs after displaying the "Remote printer" message may indicate that the failing process is the one it's trying to run next. You will have to examine the contents of /etc/rc2.d to determine what that process might be.

The /dev/user1 (/dev/user2 and /dev/user3) are just filesystems that the system is trying to mount. It should be able to boot even if those are bad, but you probably won't have the data you hope to find until they are operational. Also, if one of the system start-up scripts requires a file which is located on one of those partitions, you could have problems going multi-user.

"Proof that there is intelligent life in Oregon. Well, Life anyway.