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Re: Need help recovering Debian that won't boot.



kenn wrote:

Kent West wrote:
kenn wrote:

Greetings.

I have a Debian server that does not complete its boot ... early on, it
display a Copyright notice for grep, then for egrep, then for grep
again, then for egrep again, then hangs .... I've booted the computer
from a Knoppix CD and can see all the files, I just can't get it to boot.
I also tried to run fsck from Knoppix but, whether from my fault or
otherwise, that didn't solve the problem.  At this point, I'm getting a
little desperate.

Any and all ideas GREATLY appreciated.

Thanks.

Kenn Caldwell




Grub or lilo?

Try starting Debian in single-user (Safe Recovery?) mode.

If that doesn't help, try feeding a line like "init=/bin/bash" to
grub/lilo; this will boot you into a rather non-functional Debian with a
bash shell as pretty much the only thing running. If this works, you
know the kernel is booting up and handing off to init properly.



Okay, booting in single-user mode got the same results, so I used

"linux init = /bin/bash" ....

i'm now booted up, and I can do some tasks like changing directories ...
but if I try to do a "ls" i get a segementation fault .... FWIW, that's
also what I was getting when this problem first presented itself -- that
is, I was able to boot okay, but couldn't "ls" ... now, I can't even boot.

Where do I go from here?  (Oh, and obviously, thanks for the advice.)

Kenn
Try mounting the partitions -- "mount -a". You may need to remount / in rw mode if you need to make changes to the file system; let's see if I can remember:
   mount -o remount,rw /
should do it.

Now does "ls" work?

What's the output of "which ls"?
What's the output of "ldd [path_to]ls"?

Maybe rename the rc[whatever]. directory so no services/daemons start up, and reboot normally, and go from there?

--
Kent



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