No login prompt! HELP!

[Dan Yefimov]

On Fri, 26 Oct 2007, Stephen Goggin wrote:

> I've got a PXE server set up, the clients boot, and all seems to be OK.
> 
> I get to the point of "Running /sbin/init", and it dies.
> 
> I change the inittab to run in runlevel 1, and I get a bash prompt. If I
> try to change the root password with passwd, I either get
> "Authentication token manipulation error" or "Authentication token lock
> busy".
> 
> This is booting from NFS so almost everything is read-only.
> 
> I've had this fixed once before, but I had to change a few things and
> make a new image on the server, and lost the changes I made. Like a
> dummy I didn't back it up, nor bookmark the page that had the fix.
> 
> I remember commenting out a file in the /etc/pam.d/ directory, and
> everything worked fine afterward...
> 
This problem has nothing to do with PAM at all. /etc , /tmp and /var need to be 
mounted read-write in order for the entire system to operate correctly. I'd 
suggest you creating tar.gz archives of /etc and /var, mounting tmpfs over /etc 
and /var, and unpacking the archives created at first step into mounted tmpfs 
systems.
-- 

    Sincerely Your, Dan.