SOLVED: INIT: cannot execute "/sbin/rc"

[motie]

I couldn't SSH to my Gentoo machine last night. Then someone with local access tried to login with root and a user account. Both failed, not even prompting him for a password.

The machine's purpose in life is to host Bugzilla. The Bugzilla installation was up and performing fine. No problems there. We just couldn't login (locally or via SSH).

My helper with local access told me someone had left "stuff" (books, etc.) on the keyboard. I had him reset the machine with Ctrl-Alt-Delete. After that reset, it didn't come up all the way. It got this far:

VFS: Mounted root (reiserfs filesystem) readonly
...
Mounted devfs on /dev
Freeing unused kernel memory: 172K freed
INIT: Version 2.86 booting
INIT: cannot execute "/sbin/rc"
INIT: cannot execute "/sbin/rc"
INIT: Enter runlevel: 3
...

I booted the machine with a Knoppix CD and ran reiserfsck on the root (reiserfs) filesystem. Its read-only check reported that it found no corruptions.

From within Knoppix, the sbin/rc/ file on that reiserfs has nice permissions (rwx for owner(root) and others) and looks like a nice script in a text editor. The file doesn't seem corrupt.

In Knoppix, I can mount that reiserfs filesystem and it behaves. I see the folders I expect to see (that is, I didn't notice anything missing.) That reiserfs filesystem does not have a lost+found directory.

I'm thinking since there was a bad shutdown and someplace a flag was set indicating "Bad shutdown -- boot in a very safe (read-only) way until this flag is removed." Could it be such a flag someplace? If so, how can I remove this flag?

Any ideas? I really need some help. And fast -- all my Bugzilla users are out of work right now. Thanks!


P.S. Someone else had a problem like mine at http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/cannot-boot-after-hard-reset-170655/ . Someone there suggested, "boot the system with a boot disk, let it check the root partition for file system errors... then simply shut the system down properly, making sure the shutdown scripts run completely." (Unfortunately, the originator of that thread just erased the computer and reinstalled Linux.)

Is that a possible solution with Gentoo? Maybe I need to boot Gentoo with a LiveCD and somehow get "/sbin/rc shutdown" to run? That might shake things up and get the system willing to boot again? Because it doesn't seem like filesystem corruption is the cause of this.

Update 17:17 EST: I noticed that reiserfs filesystem has NO /bin/ directory on it. Could this be the problem? No bash for rc to execute? The shebang line in its /sbin/rc does say "!/bin/bash".

Note: No one else logs into this machine but me. It has no X Windows on it. So it's unlikely a user deleted or moved the "/bin/" directory.

SOLUTION 18:14 EST: Solved. The /bin/ directory had been renamed. Must have been me. Ugh. Renamed back to "/bin/" and things came up fine.