INIT: Command is respawning too rapidly...

[Johannes Sjogren]

In article <1991Apr08.133110.11967 at virtech.uucp> cpcahil at virtech.uucp (Conor P. Cahill) writes:
>moore at forty2.enet.dec.com (Paul Moore) writes:
>>Can someone help me with this problem when I boot up my ISC-based system. I get
>>the following series of messages displayed on the terminal:
>>    INIT: Command is respawning too rapidly. Check for possible errors
>>    id: co "/etc/getty console console"

I have just recently had exactly the same problem. Init complained about all
my getty:s, on both console, vtxx and ttyd0.
I booted my system from floppy and changed the initdefault entry in
/etc/inittab to 's'. After this I was able to reboot from the hard disk
and get the system up in single user mode. If I tried doing "init 2" to get
to multiuser I just ended up in respawning getty-land again..

>The proble is probably one of the following:
>
>	1. /etc/getty is gone
>	2. /etc/gettydefs is corrupted (or at least the console, vt01 and vt02
>	   entries are trashed)

They seemed Ok on my system. I tried starting a getty manually 
("/etc/getty /dev/vt01") and it started up OK and prompted on the expected
virtual terminal (vt01).

>	3. /dev/console is gone or has the incorrect device numbers

Both /dev/console and /dev/vtxx were OK.

>	4. /unix is screwed up (I would only suspect this if you recently 
>	   made a new unix, or suffered some sort of system crash)

I thought my /unix could be damaged so I replaced it with an old one. No 
change. 

I also tried reinstalling the core floppys. This didn't work either.
Finally I ended up doing a full re-install. Now it seem to work.
-- 
  Johannes Sjogren				sgren at dynas.se
  DynaSoft, Dynamic Software AB			Phone: +46-8-726 85 60
  Liljeholmsv 10, S-117 61 STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN	Fax: +46-8-18 11 45