Re: Re: Need help recovering Debian that won't boot.
Check the startup messages (page up on the initial screen if you can) and
verify that /usr is mounting correctly. I recently had a similar problem on a
machine that had /usr installed in a partition separate from /. Without /usr
mounted, the machine could not find grep/egrep, which breaks some important
part of the boot process, leading to an error that sound similar to yours. If
there is a problem with /usr; fixing that, perhaps using Knoppix, might
restore your system to operation.
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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
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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
Did you make any changes to the system recently? Many years ago I got into a
situation very similar to what you describe when I forced a package to
install, leaving me with a libc6 that was incompatible with pretty much every
program on the computer - including ls.
As I was fairly new to the whole Linux thing back then, the easiest for me
then was to re-install debian. Hopefully you will not have to take such
extreme measures.
--
Best regards,
Peter Hugosson-Miller
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