In a merry fashion, I was going along my merry way and hadn't made any
significant changes to my system for over a week, then all of a sudden
it starts to hang on boot. The final boot messages say:
...
Init: ID "2" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
Init: ID "3" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
Init: ID "4" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
Init: ID "5" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
Init: ID "6" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
Init: ID "1" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
Init: cannot execute "/sbin/getty"
...
and then it repeats this set of messages so many times I can't see
anything above it).
with a final message saying something like "no more processes to execute
in this runlevel" and then it hangs there and says it can't
execute /sbin/shutdown though it recognizes my "ctrl+alt+delete"
keystrokes.
After some searching I found that this is a somewhat common problem
caused on many linux platforms whenever, while booting, Init tries to
start a process in a given runlevel that has a broken library. The
getty isn't handed what it's waiting for, so it respawns over and over
until it's disabled. I need to determine what this broken library
causing all this is.
So, passing the init=/bin/bash parameter to grub to bypass the init
process, I looked at /var/log/messages and /var/log/dmesg for any clues
and couldn't identify the malodorously crashing process causing the
getty to respawn. How do I look at the full previous set of boot
messages? Dmesg doesn't show these boot messages about respawning.
I guess to back up, has anyone seen something like this recently and
what troubleshooting approach would work best here, because I can get my
hands on decent logs/output that tell me what's going wrong? Thanks in
advance!
-Eric
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