serial console problem

["Jaldhar H. Vyas" <jaldhar@braincells.com>]

[Please cc me, I'm not on the list]

I have a headless Netra iServer (Sparc 20) which I tried to upgrade to
potato.  Now whenever I try to boot to multiuser mode (single-user is
fine) it says:

modprobe: can't locate module char-major-4

about 20 times followed by:

INIT: Id "1" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: Id "3" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: Id "4" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: Id "5" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: Id "2" respawni
INIT: Id "6" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: no more processes left in this runlevel


char-major-4 is aliased to serial

I thought maybe the stock kernel-image (2.2.9) might not have serial
console support so I compiled my own but still no dice.  Can anyone help?

Other relevant packages are 

sysvinit   2.76-4
base-files 2.1.6
libc6      2.1.1.9
modconf    0.2.26
modutils   2.1.121-22

-- 
Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar@debian.org>