Startup problem

[Gene Heskett]

On Tuesday 06 July 2004 13:27, Robert Locke wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-07-06 at 02:17, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > There are instructions at the bottom of the grub screen, pick the
> > kernel you want to boot, hit the magic 'edit' key combo, then add the
> > word single to the end of the displayed line, and remove the 'ro' in
> > the middle of it and hit the enter key.  This will put you in single
> > user mode and let you try to fix it.
>
> Gene,
>
> Actually the removal of the ro is probably redundant....
>
> When the kernel boots, it mounts the root filesystem (normally
> read-only) based on the existence of the ro.  This is so later, we can
> still do an fsck on the filesystem (cannot do it on a filesystem that is
> mounted rw, but can on one mounted ro).
>
> Now, the word "single", "s" or "S" as a kernel parameter gets passed to
> init that boots us into single user mode.  Single user mode will run
> /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit, which will then "remount" the root filesystem
> read-write after checking it and should mount the rest of your
> filesystems after checking them also.  Of course, if fsck fails, we end
> up getting dumped into an sulogin shell to try to repair the filesystem.
>
> Personally, I use an "a", "space", "s", "Enter" to boot myself into
> single user mode.
>
> --Rob

The few times I've done that, I recall having to remount / read/write before I 
could modify anything.  But thats been a bit more than a year, probably 
closer to 3 since I last had to do that.  Thanks for the update!