centos

jameswilson · Post by **jameswilson** » Tue Mar 07, 2006 9:52 am

Hi all, totally unrelated but i have broke one of my centos 4.1 servers. I did and update (after an uptime of 200 days) an now it wont boot. It strats ok loads all the things etc then drops back to the screen and the last thing you can see is enabling swap space [ OK] and all the others that preceed that. The machine hasnt crashed as apache is working fine, but i cant log into it. If i alt ctrl f2 etc i just get a flashing cursur no login. Any great suggestions as i dont want to lose this thing?

Post by **zoneminder** » Tue Mar 07, 2006 10:57 pm

Do you get the grub bootloader prompt beforte it starts booting? If so you might be able to get in there and/or use a rescue disk to give the filesystem a check over in single user mode. This possibly sounds complicated but can be relatively simple.

jameswilson · Post by **jameswilson** » Tue Mar 07, 2006 11:14 pm

It goes through all the motions fine and boots as its serving web pages just fine, but i cant get into it

Post by **zoneminder** » Tue Mar 07, 2006 11:23 pm

If you have no gettys running then it may be a problem with your /etc/inittab file. Obviously you can't get to that currently, so you may still need to go in with a rescue disk. Do you have ssh (or even telnet) running? If so can you get in over the network?

jameswilson · Post by **jameswilson** » Tue Mar 07, 2006 11:25 pm

unfortunatly not everything is firewalled off. Its been great until i tried to patch it. Is there like a safemode startup i can do?

Post by **zoneminder** » Tue Mar 07, 2006 11:27 pm

You should be able to boot into single user mode by intercepting grub, or whatever bootloader Centos uses. This won't have full functionality but should allow you to log in an edit files etc. If that doesn't work then it is a Linux rescue session for you, which is more or less the same thing except you are running Linux off a CD and editing your files from a different instance.

jameswilson · Post by **jameswilson** » Tue Mar 07, 2006 11:27 pm

oh yeah i could use a zm live cd lol

jameswilson · Post by **jameswilson** » Tue Mar 07, 2006 11:37 pm

Phil, the grub editing worked Im back in now. Thanks matey again as always.

Post by **zoneminder** » Tue Mar 07, 2006 11:42 pm

Good. I was a bit worried about trying to explain linux rescue in emails!

jameswilson · Post by **jameswilson** » Tue Mar 07, 2006 11:56 pm

you were worried, i already had plans to move the toilet into my office!!