RS/6000 - Boots, but cannot login 3

[madhatter03]

RS/6000 boots all of the way to the welcome screen. NFS and Telnet processes fail. Boot log on display says that the User ID is unknown. No user accounts are recognized. Cannot log in to any account, including root.

Is there a way to boot this machine without a login prompt?

Is it possible that the passwd file has been corrupted?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Boria]

Hi,
try to boot in service mode from installation media and go to maintenance.
Regards Boris

 

[DSMARWAY]

hi,

what type of machine is it?

DO you have a valid mksysb tape ?

 

[madhatter03]

I have been able to boot into maintance mode and get a command prompt. The password file looks fine. But, the machine still has an user id problem of some sort. Basic system processes will not start and the su command does not work (maybe it should not in maintance mode).

Does AIX 4.3 write out a log file someplace that can be reviewed for more clues?

Thanks!

 

[bi]

There is a file in /var/adm/ras named bootlog, which is written to when a system boots. If you have a lot of devices on this system, the bootlog might not show you everything, however, because there is a default size for the file which is rather small. Once the size is reached, the file is overwritten from the top down.

You can change the size of the file through smitty alog to make sure you get all of the messages. The log you want to change is boot.

You can view the log file with the command alog -o -t boot.

You will have to make sure that your /var filesystem is mounted for all this. I don't know if it is in maintenance mode.

 

[BFOJ]

Are you running NIS on this machine?

 

[Boria]

Hi,
check in maintenance mode that /etc/passwd file contains right line for users:
root, bin, sys, adm, deamon.
Regards Boris

 

[MissVick]

I have seen this occur when the root filesystem (/) is full ... sometimes after root user does a verbose mksysb and smit.log gets too big. Might be worth checking from maintenance.

 

[madhatter03]

The problem has been resolved. Getting into maintenance mode was an essential step for getting to a command prompt. The passwd file looked good, but only because I was not seeing the first line. After setting the terminal type to something reasonable, the vi editor worked correctly and I could see that the first line in the passwd file was corrupted. Once that was fixed, the issue was resolved.

Thanks for everyone's help!