I backed up my RHEL 4 as an image.
Then I restored the image (by mondorestore) on my machine. Everything went fine but I dont get the normal boot sequence as it used to come when I freshly installed RHEL4.
The messages that are shown when the system boots are something like-
" .....
EXT3-fs: INFO: recovery required on readonly filesystem.
EXT3-fs: write access will be enabled during recovery.
kjournald starting. Commit interval 5
EXT3-fs: recovery complete.
EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
"
At this point, system waits for a while and then login prompt comes up normally. Everything in the system is working fine.
I just need to understand how this boot sequence got changed.
Is there anyway by which I can restore the normal boot sequence which used to get previously...
something like (may not be exactly similar)-
Linux startup service scripts are found in the directory /etc/rc.d/rc#.d/ (for Rehdat) where the symbol # represents the run level.
i.e. the run level "3" will run all the scripts in the directory /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/ which start with the letter "S" during system boot. This starts the background processes required by the system. Services start in numerical order. S20abc is run before S30xyz. These S# and K# files are just links to the actual scripts in /etc/init.d
Note: K is for kill or shutdown. Those scripts are executed when you shutdown the system.
If you are in runlevel 5, then have a look at /etc/rc.d/rc5.d and see how the scripts have been numbered. You can change the numbering, but that should only done if you know what you are doing! Otherwise some services may not start as they are dependent on other.
The problem is all the services get started as usual, but i dont see any messages like which services got started and which failed to start.
After observing boot log I came to know that the messages-
"EXT3-fs: write access will be enabled during recovery.
kjournald starting. Commit interval 5
EXT3-fs: recovery complete.
EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
"
also come in normal unimaged system, and since they are very quick, we just cant read those. After the last message shown above, another message comes saying-
"switching to new root"
But in the problem case described here, after image restore, the system doesnt show these messages. It stops for sometime at-
"EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode."
and then normal login prompt appears.
How can I get those messages to appear again as before ?
So reboot the box, append to the end of grub "single" and boot the os; after you are at the bash prompt run fsck /dev/sda1 (or w/e your drives are) and make sure they pass an fsck. If all is good after that mount the drive and double check you dont have any .autofsck files on the fs. Then reboot and see what happens.
whenever I try to run the fsck after the system boots up completely, it does nothing. Just shows the version of fsck and exits-
#root# fsck
fsck 1.35 (28-Feb-2004) #root#
I dont know what to do now. M totally blank and running out of options and clues.
What I deduce till now is kernel is booting fine, system is also booting fine, but after the kernel boot up messages, Init messages are not shown on the console, it just finishes running in the background and gives the login prompt.
The init messages are not shown even during shutdown process.
You have to tell fsck which partition to check, it doesn't know. See 'man fsck'. And you cannot fsck a mounted partition anyway, you'd have to do so from a recovery disk or somesuch.
I thought RHEL4 used GRUB?