sco 5.0.7
my ancient sco unix system hangs on booting gives me the following error message
exit-/etc/init (PID1) DIED, STATUS 0X0000009F
had trouble shutting down last night would give me login prompt but would not let me into root with password.- I powered off probably compounded the issues. now I get above message during boot.
have the boot disk but do not want to make bigger mess.
bill
Well, i am not an SCO-expert by any stretch but init is the process which starts all other processes in a classical UNIX system. If this process dies (and does so repeatedly) my guess is you are in deep kimchi.
This is actually quite probable: UNIX systems maintain their filesystem information partly in memory, which is why they take it as an insult to switch them off without properly shutting them down. Most probable you have indeed made things worse.
My suggetion is to start from the boot disk and do a "file system check" (or "fsck") on your disk. You might also want to hold your backups ready for restore/reinstallation. You do have backups, don't you?
Once this is done you can start investigating why the correct root-pw won't gain you entrance, but this is a (at first glance) unrelated story.
I hope this helps.
bakunin
have my boot disk out was little shy with using fsck disk ( I know lots of different options)
guess I cannot screw anything up worse! guess my luck may have run out - using this system for over 20 years on various platforms.
You say that you have a boot disk? Does the system have a floppy drive?
Usually, SCO systems have a 'boot' disk and a 'root' disk floppy. You start with a boot disk and then it prompts you to change to the root disk.
Initially I would definitely put the '-n' option on the fsck command to tell it whatever the question is, the answer is 'no'. That will prevent fsck making ANY changes to the root filesystem until you know how much it is damaged.
does have floppy drive which I have never used and do have 'boot' no 'root" disk- tried booting with floppy after powering down - system steps right around the floppy drive though it floopy is showing in setup and is first in the boot sequence - my guess is the drives are on scsci controllers and may not see the floppy- checking my wiring next -do remember switching machines after the hardware had issues - may have led to floppy issue.
thanks!
will use the -n opition as you suggested.
This might be relevant:
My system panics with "PANIC: exit cannot exec /etc/init (PID 1) status 9."
(Searched for OpenServer 5.0.7 "/etc/init died" on above knowledgebase"
You should be able to boot from CD/DVD and enter "maintenance mode". Then mount your hard disk root filesystem (on /mnt of the CD) and then take a look around.
awesome ! thanks for the help!
bill
I also (think I) remember that, when booting from CD/DVD or floppy, the kernel creates a device node 'hd0root' to point to any hard disk root filesystem. Therefore to take a look around from CD booted maintenance mode you can:
# mount /dev/hd0root /mnt
# cd /mnt
# ls
Obviously to umount that you would:
# cd /
# umount /dev/hd0root (or # umount /mnt)
Without hd0root mounted (of course) you can:
# fsck -n /dev/hd0root
to see any damage to the hd root filesystem.
Hope that helps.
The likelihood of successfully booting from a diskette is very low. I went through this process recently, and was unable to create a btld diskette for 5.0.5. I ended up calling one of the diskette manufacturers and their tech people told be that the life expectancy of a diskette is less than 10 years, and that they stopped manufacturing diskettes more than 10 years ago.
SCSI disks have a write protect jumper.
What I would do, write protect your boot disk, change the scsi id from 0 to 1, get a new/reconditioned disk scsi 0, and do a fresh install on it, Go through the process of adding the original disk as a second disk, and copy the data to the new drive.
When adding the second disk, do not create any new files ystems, and rename the divisions so that they do not conflict with the divisions on drive 0 that have the same names.
I would buy 2 drives, one to load the new OS and the second to create a duplicate after everything is cleaned up so this doesn't happen again.
Fortunately I haven't had to do this in probably 10 years but JGT's suggested way works well. I simplify things for recovery by keeping the boot drive clean and putting data/programs on a separate drive and use another drive as the destination for backups.
trying to replace diskette with cd rom drive to try use cd - system does recognize new cd rom dirve when booting - not sure which cd I should be trying to use - do not have maintence disk do have install cd - which cd do I need to get to maintence menu
need help not sure where to turn - guys used 10 yrs ago retried on dead!
Do you have any working floppy media? The installation CD media usually has images of the first few floppy disks (1.44MB) on the CD. Put the media in a Windows machine and take a look.
Also, I recall that, when at the install screens, at one point you can hit F8 and select "Shell escape" but, unfortunately, it isn't a very powerfull shell and very few commands; although 'mount' is available.
The best route is probably that suggested by jgt and do a fresh install onto a spare HDD and then mounting your current disk as a secondary drive. Then you will be able to 'fsck' it, etc.
sco install cd -do see the read me file to create floppies
now have to pfind pc with floppy drive
See the other thread from today about booitng to a shell prompt from a cd.
did follow ideas with jgt helping very much got two new hard drives tried installing 5.07 many different ways nothing worked jdt suggested downloading 6 which I did after few media issues 6 is now running in maintence mode with old drive 0 also installed - hoping to take look at the old drive and possibly find a fix! thanks! bill
After two weeks of emails and phone calls, we have been able to copy all the programs and data off his old system onto a Windows desktop system, with no loss of data. 