How to recover from invalid inittab file?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Mon, 14 Feb 2005, Brian Fahrlander wrote:

> On Mon, 2005-02-14 at 06:48 -0800, David Le wrote:
> > Dear Linux gurus,
> >
> > I'm new to Fedora at system level and encountered the
> > following problem with inittab file:
> > When I was as root, I accidentally copied the inittab
> > file, which is for my target hardware, over the
> > innittab file of my host PC running Fedora Core 1.
> > Now after I re-boot my PC, it stops at the following
> > messages:
> >           inittab: missing field
> >           Enter run level:
> >
> > -How can I recover completely from my invalid inittab
> > file?
>
>     Someone who knows how, can edit it.  I'm minutes from my blood-
> pressure medicine from putting me to sleep, or I'd ssh in there and
> un- mangle it.

i'm pretty sure that, at the grub prompt, you can edit the kernel line
and append the string "init=/bin/sh", which will bypass the init
process entirely and come up with a simple shell.  after that, you're
on your own.

rday