Linux can't boot

[Guest_imported]

I've a linux box running suse 6. After rebooting the machine, I got the following errors:

INIT: cannot execute "sbin/init.d/boot"
INIT: enter runlevel: 2
INIT: cannot execute "sbin/init.d/rc"
INIT: id '1' respawning too fast, disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: id '2' respawning too fast, disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: id '3' respawning too fast, disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: id '4' respawning too fast, disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: id '5' respawning too fast, disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: id '6' respawning too fast, disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: no more processes left in this run level
... (and keep repeating the above lines)

Any suggestion/fix for this is much appreciated. I really don't want to rebuild the box :[ Thx

 

[ifincham]

Hi,

Sounds nasty - /sbin/init.d/boot would be the initial Suse start-up script - maybe there's some corruption in your /sbin directory. The first thing would be to boot to single user mode (runlevel S under Suse) and run fsck. So you'd get the lilo 'boot:' prompt at the bottom of the screen and type 'linux S' so that it looks like 'boot: linux S' .. then press enter and it should stop with a root prompt (no login needed). Then do 'fsck -y /dev/hda1' (substitute your actual root partition for /dev/hda1). After that try 'init 1' and see if you get the same errors; or 'sync' and 'init 6' to reboot if you prefer.

If the scripts are damaged / missing I can only suggest you find out what rpm provides them and reinstall that. 'rpm -q --whatprovides /sbin/init.d/boot' .

Hope this helps

 

[marsd]

I've run SuSE for several years now: I had the same problem once; but I'll be darned if I remember how I fixed it.
i believe it was related to the getty process, and an entry
in inittab.

there is this article:

http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue46/tag/5.html

Which talks about some problems with improperly behaving
apps that leave lockfiles, pidfiles and socket descriptors
cluttering up the place after a hard reboot or crash. That also mentions this behavior. Check for the existence of all
tty devices in inittab.

Other than that ifinchams advice is sound-an fsck would not hurt. After that, you could try to run SuSEconfig and look
for bad entries or errors in rc.config and inittab.
Also run a search at the suse support db for respawn too fast, for more info.

Good Luck