error "respawning too fast" on Toshiba Protege 7200

[Robert Locke]

On Thu, 2004-10-07 at 14:25, David Mamanakis wrote:
> Here is an error that I receive on my Toshiba Protege 7200 (with dock/dvd)
> when I "up2date" everything...
> 
> "init: Id "x" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes."
> 
> I have tried several things, but I cannot seem to get this error to go away...
> 
> 1) How do you stop linux from booting into the GUI and go into Command Line mode?
> 
> 2) How do I searchout this error and fix it?
>      a) How do I find out what is causing the problem (hardware, or what?)?
>      b) What settings can I change to fix it?
> 
> Thanks all!
> 

Usually this is related to you booting in to run level 5 but the
configuration of X is not correct.

First, get yourself back to runlevel 3 on a semi-permanent basis.  Edit
the /etc/inittab file and change the line id:5:initdefault to
id:3:initdefault.

This will boot you in to runlevel 3 (text mode only) to begin
troubleshooting your X problem.

Next we need to try to correct the X configuration.  The first step is
usually to allow the program to try to fix it, so you may want to try
invoking system-config-display and see if you can modify the "Advanced"
tab to have the correct video driver and monitor selected.

Next we probably want to investigate what video card you have and you
may want to troll over to the Wiki at fedoraproject.org/wiki for some
information about specific video cards (i.e. there are extra steps for
nVidia)....

To test your X configuration, try running "startx" from the text based
console.  If everything seems happy, then Logout out of the GUI, and go
back to editing the /etc/inittab file back to a "5" so your system will
boot into the GUI instead....

HTH,

--Rob