INIT: Id "1" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

[Freek Dijkstra <public@macfreek.nl>]

Hi,

I'm (re)installing Woody. The steps which involve creating a working root
file system (using disks-powerpc/current/powermac/ramdisk.image.gz) work
fine.

Now, after I reboot I get this message:
INIT: Id "1" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

I'm not entirely sure what it means, but according to previous messages to
the list, the following line in (/target)/etc/inittab is the culprit:

1:2345:respawn:/usr/sbin/termwrap /usr/sbin/base-config </dev/tty1
>/dev/tty1 2>&1

However, the line as such seems fine with me. So I don't know what the
problem is.

I seem to have to workarounds:
1) Try over, and hope it does work now (after all, I had it working before,
but deleted the disk in favour of a different disk partition scheme)
2) Run /usr/sbin/base-config manually.

I'm opting for the last, but I can't login! tty2 and tty3 do show a prompt,
but I haven't set the pwd for root yet. An option is to manually edit
/target/etc/passwd while booting from the ramdisk. However, could someone
please tell me what to put in that line? I don't know how the passwd is
encrypted (dunno if it is different for shadow files either). Could someone
be so kind to set a password of any account to anything, let's say
"insecure" and see how this shows in the /etc/passwd file (provided you
don't have a shadow file!)

Thanks!
Freek