X Window problem

[Gary and El Byrnes]

I guess the reason why my system asks for fsck is that being unable to do anything with non-working X I had to manually restart the machine.

I will give my machine a go now with a clean shutdown to see if mount -a works on it.

I did do the clean reboot. After boot -s, mount -a produced the following error message: /var and /usr were not properly dimounted.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: CARTER Anthony 
  To: Matthew Seaman ; CARTER Anthony 
  Cc: Eduardo Viruena Silva ; Gary and El Byrnes ; freebsd-questions at freebsd.org 
  Sent: Tuesday, May 06, 2003 8:10 PM
  Subject: Re: X Window problem


  Strange then...Whenever I have booted into single user mode I have been unable 
  to write to the root partition, even after a mount -a...even with ESC w!q in 
  vi...Maybe I did something wrong...Would it possibly be likely that mount -a 
  doesn't report back that / needs fscking first? Everytime I have had to do 
  this I needed to fsck root first...

  Just a thought,
  Anthony

  On Tuesday 06 May 2003 12:05, Matthew Seaman wrote:
  > On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 11:31:12AM +0200, CARTER Anthony wrote:
  > > I think that you should do this first:
  > >
  > > mount -u /
  > >
  > > this re-mounts root as read-write, otherwise you are in read-only in
  >
  > single
  >
  > > user mode...
  > >
  > > then do:
  > >
  > > mount -a
  > > swapon -a
  >
  > Actually, although the handbook recommends 'mount -u /' in
  >
  >
  > http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/makeworld.html
  >
  > as does the FAQ in
  >
  >
  > http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/admin.html#FORGOT-R
  > OOT-PW
  >
  > it hasn't strictly been necessary for at least a year now.  'mount -a'
  > will automatically re-mount the root filesystem read-write anyway.  If
  > the original poster was following the instructions, that wouldn't have
  > been the cause of their latest problem.
  >
  > > On Tuesday 06 May 2003 11:15, Eduardo Viruena Silva wrote:
  > > > On Tue, 6 May 2003, Gary and El Byrnes wrote:
  > > > > I got to the point where I edited the /etc/ttys file back to what
  >
  > it
  >
  > > > > was. When I tried saving it, I got a message that the file is
  >
  > read-only
  >
  > > > > and use ! to override.
  >
  > Seems that your /etc/ttys file has ended up without write permissions
  > --- that's non-standard: the mode is usually 0644 --- but so long as
  > everything has read permission that needs it, won't cause any
  > problems.
  >
  > If you're in single user mode then you have superuser powers: you can
  > just override the filesystem permissions by:
  >
  >     Esc : w q !
  >
  > from within vi(1) and everything should end up the way you want, and
  > you can get on with generating a working X configuration.
  >
  > Cheers,
  >
  > Matthew