cannot execute "/sbin/agetty"

kevdoig · Apprentice Joined: 03 May 2004 Posts: 171

Hi, i've had a stable gentoo sytem running, off and on, 3-4months now, but am having problems after an update. ran emerge rsync, and update world/system(emerge --update system; emerge --update world).. but now whe rebooting i get the following error:
cannot execute "/sbin/agetty"

i've read other posts tried adding single argument to kernel parameters and copying devfsd.conf from the gentoo-live cd. Any ideas?

Kalin · Posted: Thu Jun 17, 2004 8:39 pm Post subject:

So you cannot login then?

Boot off the LiveCD, mount your root form the hard (mkdir /mnt/t1 && mount /dev/hd<YOUR_ROOT_HERE> /mnt/tmp1) and send the output of the following commands:

ls -l /mnt/tmp1/sbin/agetty

grep getty /mnt/tmp1/etc/inittab

as a starter for debugging.

Try to chroot (as per the Gentoo install instructions) and emerge agetty again. (You can try mingetty as well).

kevdoig · Apprentice Joined: 03 May 2004 Posts: 171

No, can't log in. Booted from live-cd fine and have got the info you needed, unfortunately i have no internet access on that machine just now so cant emerge aggetty again. here the info if it helps though.

ls -l /mnt/gentoo/sbin/agetty

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 14856 Jun 17 18:22 /mnt/gentoo/sbin/agetty

grep getty /mnt/gentoo/etc/inittab

c1:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty1 linux
c2:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty2 linux
c3:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty3 linux
c4:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty4 linux
c5:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty5 linux
c6:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty6 linux

Kalin · Posted: Fri Jun 18, 2004 10:50 am Post subject:

Hmm, the output looks resonable.

What kernel are you using (or did emerge world update the kernel as well?, I doubt it).

Probbably you have problem with not opening a tty, so the result is agetty cannot be run.

Check the following options in your kernel config:
CONFIG_DEVFS_FS=y
CONFIG_DEVFS_MOUNT=y
CONFIG_VGA_CONSOLE=y
CONFIG_UNIX98_PTYS=y

Aren't there any errors during the boot?

You know, you can stop the scrolling by pressing ScrollLock, right :-)

There was something to set up in /etc/conf.d/rc to have init.d scripts log all output, but cannot find it now :-(

kevdoig · Apprentice Joined: 03 May 2004 Posts: 171

Everything looks fine to me.. still the same problem though. Oh well looks like another stage1 install for me lol :lol: