/sbin/init missing!

RockCrusha · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 31 Jan 2004 Posts: 91

I have just noticed why computer boots straight to an sh prompt.... /sbin/init is totally gone. no idea where or how it became missing! ok, so what would i emerge to get it to come back? is init established in the bootstrapping process, or should i just decompress another stage?

also, if i go ahead decompressing another stage, will it cause problems with my currently emerged programs? will /home/users* files be affected?

RockCrusha · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 31 Jan 2004 Posts: 91

nevermind, the init missing, it's actually there.
it's just not being run at startup for some reason. no error messages, just an sh prompt after it checks reiserfs. no my /boot partition is ext3 and my / partition is reiser.

why is it booting to an sh prompt? why isn't init being run? dmesg produces no errors. this is totally strange. should i just uncompress another stage? will it cripple my previous install?

Steven Robertson · Posted: Sat Aug 07, 2004 2:22 pm Post subject:

Check /sbin/init permissions. Make sure it is executable. If it is, try running it from within your shell. What does it do?

The /sbin/init file is owned by the package sys-apps/sysvinit. If it's all borked up, delete the file, then remerge sysvinit.

HTH.

RockCrusha · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 31 Jan 2004 Posts: 91

i was right the first time. /sbin/init totally isn't there. it was my mistake the 2nd time, when i was accidentally checking the contents of the livecd

i need to get another /sbin/init.

tar -xvjpf stage*?

Steven Robertson · Posted: Sat Aug 07, 2004 2:32 pm Post subject:

If you're unable to emerge a new version of sysvinit, run this:

RockCrusha · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 31 Jan 2004 Posts: 91

yeah that brought the system up...with certain init errors, but for the most part things are good.

thanx, very curious as to how this happend

RockCrusha · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 31 Jan 2004 Posts: 91

i was also missing /sbin/reboot , /sbin/shutdown.... highly strange

vosechu · n00b Joined: 07 Aug 2004 Posts: 23

The Linux FHS mentions that all directories aside from proc, tmp, var, and home should be mounted read-only. On a production system one should aspire to this (though it's difficult for sure).

The reason being, if power dies or anything silly happens, the chances of things disappearing are far, far less.

Strange things happen sometimes, but just for kicks you might try running a chkrootkit whenever strangeness happens :)