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Hi,
while I was maintaining and looked what changes in *.pacnew files were made I decided to carry my changes in the inittab file to the inittab.pacnew, save the old inittab as inittab.old and then executed:
sudo mv inittab.pacnew initab
I accidentially misspelled inittab with just one t. However I didn't notice until after a reboot, since now INIT tells me it can't find inittab and asks for a runlevel. On runlevels 1, 3 and 5 it then tells me "No more processes left in this runlevel" and I cannot interact with the computer anymore, short of forcing a hard shutdown.
Is there any chance of repairing my stupid mistake, short of downloading an arch iso and boot from USB? The only stages I can interfere with the process is BIOS and GRUB.
Any advice will be appreciated!
Neuneck
Last edited by Neuneck (2010-10-09 19:54:05)
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I would boot a livecd (any linux livecd), mount the drive and just rename the file. Then reboot again and everything should work.
MadEye | Registered Linux user #167944 since 2000-02-28 | Homepage
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Maybe you can boot to recovery console from grub.
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How would I do that? What do I need to edit in my grub command line? Thanks for the tips!
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How would I do that? What do I need to edit in my grub command line? Thanks for the tips!
Hmm, seems that w/o the inittab it's not possible, sorry.
I can recommend Tiny Core liveCD - it's very small, boots in seconds, all you need to do is mount the right partition and rename that file.
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As already suggested, use any live CD/USB - if you don't have at least one lying around, deduct 10 1337 points from your total and go stand in the corner.
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i'd use chroot. look up in the ArchWiki
Arch x86_64 ATI AMD APU KDE frameworks 5
---------------------------------
Whatever I do, I always end up with something horribly mis-configured.
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i'd use chroot. look up in the ArchWiki
No need for that, just boot a liveCD and rename the misspelled file. It took me 30s with Tiny Core.
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Primoz wrote:i'd use chroot. look up in the ArchWiki
No need for that, just boot a liveCD and rename the misspelled file. It took me 30s with Tiny Core.
Oh so you can just mount the partition and that's that. And I always mucked around with chroot... Good to know.
Arch x86_64 ATI AMD APU KDE frameworks 5
---------------------------------
Whatever I do, I always end up with something horribly mis-configured.
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karol wrote:Primoz wrote:i'd use chroot. look up in the ArchWiki
No need for that, just boot a liveCD and rename the misspelled file. It took me 30s with Tiny Core.
Oh so you can just mount the partition and that's that. And I always mucked around with chroot... Good to know.
Obviously you need to chroot if you want to run pacman etc., but it's not necessary for renaming a file.
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Primoz wrote:karol wrote:No need for that, just boot a liveCD and rename the misspelled file. It took me 30s with Tiny Core.
Oh so you can just mount the partition and that's that. And I always mucked around with chroot... Good to know.
Obviously you need to chroot if you want to run pacman etc., but it's not necessary for renaming a file.
# pacman --root /mnt/arch --cachedir /mnt/arch/var/cache/pacman/pkg --config /mnt/arch/etc/pacman.conf
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Primoz wrote:karol wrote:No need for that, just boot a liveCD and rename the misspelled file. It took me 30s with Tiny Core.
Oh so you can just mount the partition and that's that. And I always mucked around with chroot... Good to know.
Obviously you need to chroot if you want to run pacman etc., but it's not necessary for renaming a file.
Oh yeah that makes sense. thanks even though I'm not OP.
But this still helps OP.
Also to make it easier to OP:
mount /dev/sda{#number of your root partition} /mnt/root
and then I guess just cd to it. maybe i'm not the best to give advice?
because I don't know if mounting this:
mount -t proce none /mnt/proc
mount -t sysfs none /mnt/sys
mount --bind
Are needed for just editing a text file or is this only for chroot. I guess it's only for chroot.
Arch x86_64 ATI AMD APU KDE frameworks 5
---------------------------------
Whatever I do, I always end up with something horribly mis-configured.
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just boot with init=/bin/bash, remount / as rw, edit inittab, remount / as ro (optional), exec /sbin/init
EDIT: oops newbie section! at grub promp for kernel command line add init=/bin/bash and boot, then on # root prompt:
mount / -o remount,rw
nano /etc/inittab
exec /sbin/init
Last edited by djgera (2010-10-08 22:38:17)
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Thank you all for your suggestions! Fortunately I did not have to get a liveCD or anything (however, my 1337 score is at -9 now, +1 for using arch, -10 for not having a liveCD )
The init = /bin/bash thing worked perfectly and saved me a lot of trouble! Thanks too for the minute description.
Now I can go on to tackle the real issue of X crashing due to a conflict with the Wacom tablet drivers...
Neuneck
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