Arch Linux

Poisonblack

Member

From: Mumbai, India

Registered: 2008-07-25

Posts: 46

SERIOUS error.! INIT: cannot execute "/sbin/agetty"

Hullo.!
I had my Arch install working fine the other day when I decided to do some cleaning inside my cabinet.I removed and cleaned the RAM, HDD, CPU fan and GPU.Now, when start my Arch install.It goes something like:

.
.
Loading UDEV UEvents [DONE]
something.(can't read as it goes by too fast) [FAIL]

Ands then the screen is filled with lots of scrolling text before it finally stalls.Here's a screenshot of where it stalls:

I tried booting through LiveCDs of other distros, but they all give some error or another.Knoppix stalls after giving Segmentation Fault.Sabayon behaves the same as Arch.PCLinuxOS just produces a lot of undecipherable text that keeps scrolling down the screen.This makes me believe it might be a hardware fault.But the strange thing is, my XP installation starts up fine.
I tried the Belenix LiveCD and it bots up fine.But couldn't make much progress from there since I am an opensolaris n00b
Any help please.?

P.S.: My sys specs are
2.4 Ghz Celeron
1 Gb DDR RAM
160 Gb + 40 Gb HDDs
Nvidia 7600 GS AGP GPU

Last edited by Poisonblack (2009-06-09 15:36:10)

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It's a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.

litemotiv

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2008-08-01

Posts: 5,026

Re: SERIOUS error.! INIT: cannot execute "/sbin/agetty"

do you have two ram modules? possibly one of them got damaged or is not properly inserted back. windows might address memory more linearly than linux (which also buffers more), so it could be that the problem is not on the start but rather the middle/end of the memory mapping.

can you run memtest from the arch (or other) livecd and do a full check? it's available from the grub menu when you boot up.

Last edited by litemotiv (2009-06-09 19:51:12)

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Poisonblack

Member

From: Mumbai, India

Registered: 2008-07-25

Posts: 46

Re: SERIOUS error.! INIT: cannot execute "/sbin/agetty"

^^Nope, I have a single stick of 1 Gb.I ran memtest using LiveCD, but the PC shuts down anytime after test #1.I am pretty sure it's not because of overheating since booting into XP right after memtest fails shows pretty normal temperatures.My guess is a faulty RAM now.Unfortunately, I don't have another stick to replace this one and check.

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It's a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.

litemotiv

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2008-08-01

Posts: 5,026

Re: SERIOUS error.! INIT: cannot execute "/sbin/agetty"

yes cleaning ram can be pretty 'dangerous', especially older ram chips are easily damaged by static electricity. a crashing memtest usually means it's either that or the motherboard (a bit less likely in this case).

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