Thanks to all that replied, Dr. Tom Blinn's answer helped with booting the system without the sysconfigtab file being loaded. (See Below). The answer was to boot from CD, open a terminal, run MAKEDEV to create the device files, run fsck against the root disk, mount the root disk, cd /etc, copy a previously saved version of the sysconfigtab file into place and reboot the machine. The answer did help me diagnose another issue as well.
Thanks,
Charles
1) It's MUCH easier to capture the real error messages if you can set up to run with a serial console and log things from, say, a PC or another UNIX system (e.g., via a "tip" session).
2) You have probably changed the /etc/sysconfigtab file. There is a way to tell the kernel to ignore that file with boot flags. But I can't find the documentation -- I *think* it's the "n" flag. No, from src/kernel/arch/alpha/alpha_init.c I find this:
case 'C':
case 'c':
/*
* ignore the configuration defaults
* stored in /etc/sysconfigtab
*/
sysconfigtab = NULL;
break;
So try "boot -flags sc" (single user mode, ignore the sysconfigtab) and you can put your sysconfigtab changes back to the originals (you did save a backup copy of the file, right?).
Tom
Charles Hooks
Manager Network Operations
Penn State University
School of Information Sciences and Technology
chooks_at_ist.psu.edu
ist.psu.edu
865-6455
Received on Wed Jul 03 2002 - 17:18:16 NZST