FreeBSD 5.4 install problem. Newbee needs help.

[Nikolas Britton]

On 8/10/05, albi at scii.nl <albi at scii.nl> wrote:
> On Tue, 09 Aug 2005 21:11:53 -0400
> William Manley <wmanley at intergate.com> wrote:
> 
> > I am a new FreeBSD user and I have an installation that has gone bad.
> > My  problems started when I enabled XDM for a graphical logon into
> > Gnome.  When I logged in as root the system just looped back to the
> > logon  screen. I then assumed I had configured my .xinitrc file wrong
> 
> xdm,gdm,kdm,wdm do not use your .xinitrc (but they can use your
> .Xsession or .xsession file), .xinitrc is only used with the command
> startx
> 
> > so I  booted the install cdrom into Fixit mode and tried to mount the
> > root  filesystem on the hardisk which the operating system would not
> > let me  do. The following are the commands I typed with the output.
> >
> > mount /dev/ad0s1a /mnt
> > operation not permitted
> 
> you could instead boot from harddisc in "single mode" (sp?), then remove
> xdm or configure xdm properly or use gdm or use gnome-session in your
> .xinitrc

Single user mode. You can get to it at the boot menu, think it's
option 6, or you can exsacpe to the boot loader and type in "boot -s"
and hit enter. Once your in single user mode you will need to mount
your partitions, "mount /dev/ad0s1f /usr", if your disk is dirty you
will need to run fsck and then remount the root partition in
read/write mode before you can edit your config files. I'm not sure
how XDM etc. is started but I would try in /usr/local/etc/rc.d/ first.
if a xdm startup script is in there rename to something like
xdm.sh-disabled. then type exit to boot into multi user mode and login
as root.