Warning: Unable to open initial console

[TonyGroves]

My SuSE 8.2 laptop has suddenly started being unable to boot; it had been working perfectly, and I had not been doing anything provocative to it. The boot sequence gets as far as the message "Warning: unable to open initial console" and stops. SuSE is the only OS on the machine.

I found a page describing this problem on the SuSE site, and followed the instructions in the section titled "/dev/tty1 got erased", as follows:
- I started to SuSE rescue system.
- I did: mknod -m600 /mnt/dev/tty1 c 4 1
and got the response that /mnt/dev doesn't exist.
- I did: cd /mnt
- I did: ls
and got it showed an empty directory.
- I did: md dev
- I did: mknod -m600 /mnt/dev/tty1 c 4 1
which produced no response
- I rebooted, but got the same error message as before.
I also found a lot of stuff on other sites about this problem, but unfortunately no solution that I was able to make head or tail of - I'm quite new to Linux.

Can anybody help here please?

Thanks a lot.

 

[stefanwagner]

Isn't it

mknod -m600 /dev/tty1 c 4 1

?

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[TonyGroves]

I tried that, but got the message:
mknod: '/dev/tty1': File exists


-----
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[stefanwagner]

a file /mnt/dev/tty1 looks very suspicious to me.
You normally put mounted partitions into /mnt like /mnt/floppy, /mnt/cdrom, /mnt/dvd ...


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[TonyGroves]

I've no idea, but that's definitely what it says on the SuSE page.

Anyway, I've given up on it now, and I'm in the process of re-installing the OS. Thanks for your help.

 

[flugh]

The /mnt/dev reference is probably due to being within a 'system rescue' mode with the installation cd. If you open a shell during installation on a debian box (not sure about others, apparently suse too though), the real, physical / partition with files being copied to is mounted at /mnt. The apprarent / is possibly the CD or a ramdrive of sorts (loopback I guess). That's why if you boot from install media to fix lilo, you have to mount your 'real' / somewhere, 'cd' to it, then 'chroot' to run lilo and have it work.

Not that it matters much, just my interpretation of why. It's either that or blue monkies.

----
JBR

 

[TonyGroves]

I see what you mean (I think); just as when you boot from a Knoppix CD, the hard disc directories are mounted into something like /mnt/hda2.

Thanks.