How to recover from invalid inittab file?

[Daniel Buggie]

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?
> -What should I do to recover from this scenario?
> -Or I have to re-install FC 1?
> 
> Some other questions about FC2:
> -Is FC2 stable enough to use as an development
> environment?
> -What kernel version of FC2?
> -Where is the easiest way to get FC2 package for
> installation?
> 
> Thanks very much for your help.
> 
> --david le.
>  

Either boot using Roberts suggestion or use rescue mode. Either way,
once your booted do the following:

Back up the existing (bad) inittab file in case this doesn't work.

Get a copy of the initscripts rpm appropriate for your version of
Fedora, then run the following:

rpm2cpio initscripts-x.y.z.i386.rpm | cpio -ivd ./etc/inittab

Check out the new inittab file and compare with the old.  If the new one
seems sane, copy it to /etc/, reboot, and cross your fingers.

Daniel