Endless booting

[Jan Isley]

In article <9832 at csli.Stanford.EDU> crimmins at csli.stanford.edu (Mark Crimmins) writes:
>
>This has happened to me a couple of times, and I wonder if anyone
>knows why.  I turn on my 3b1 (3.5M 67HD rev. 3.5 sys and utils) and it
>goes through the normal boot procedure until the "checking stored
>files" screen turns to gibberish and then the boot procedure starts
>over (and over and over).  The problem goes away when I "upgrade" all
>system files from floppy, including utilities.

Well, this used to happen to me and thanks to John Milton, I was able to
fix my problem.  Maybe it will work for you.

FSCK has a nasty habbit of saying it fixed a problem it found in the file
system when it really did not fix it.  You know it found a problem if the
system does a reboot after the "checking stored files" routine.  Usually
the system will come up after the second time through.  But, sometimes
the problem was not really fixed, and fsck will *never* be able to fix
it on a mounted file system.

Solution:  Create a floppy unix disk (set if you are not using 3.5" disks)
and cp /etc/fsck onto it.  Boot this "floppy unix" and run fsck on the
unmounted hard disk file system.  You will be able to see what the fsck
is doing, something you do not see during a normal boot.  You will probably
see a message that says something like "file system has been modified".
It really has been modified this time!  I run into this *often* while 
configuring and burning in machines.  It is almost always a problem in 
the superblock which the normal boot routine execution of fsck will not
repair.

I believe that Lenny posted some info on creating floppy unix disks a
little while back.  I'm not sure that further discussion of the fine 
details of this is appropriate to discuss here.  'Security' concious
system adminstrators out there know why.

Jan Isley, follower of Zen, picker of nit
jan at bagend | gatech!bagend!jan | (404) 434-1335