boot messages overwritten by run level 3 login

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Sat, 8 May 2004, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook wrote:

>
> Hi I've just had to relocate my FC1 to a different partition. I used
> tar...  Then I edited the new fedora's /etc/fstab & /etc/lilo.conf & a
> few scripts.
>
> FC1 booted successfully in it's new home. Everything seams to be working
> correctly (so far).
>
> But just before the runlevel 3 boot prompt there are a few warning
> messages I don't get time to read before the boot prompt steps on them.
> No problem I thinks. <shift>+<page up> But while most of the boot screen
> messages are there, the error messages I'm looking for which were near
> the bottom are not there.
>
> I searched the archive for boot + log. But all it told me about was the
> dmesg command and of course var/log/* But nothing in var/log (including
> dmesg seems to have the same exact text as was printed to the console.
> I'm sure that the data in the logs is probably considered more
> significant. But I sometimes see errors there that do NOT appear in the
> /var/log logs. I'm thinking that this output is not saved to a log by
> default.
>
> I'd like to know if there is something I can do to cause this exact text
> to actually be logged someplace???  or if there is a way to stop the login
> prompt from clearing the last screenful of the boot screen messages???

In /etc/inittab, scan down to the section about gettys.  Add the option
'--noclear' to the end of the first mingetty command.  That will prevent
the screen clear when the login prompt is issued so you can
<shift>-<pageup>.

-- 
		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs