Bootup Problem 4.8-Stable- SOLVED

[John Straiton]

> On Tue, Apr 15, 2003 at 02:59:41PM +0100, Daniel Bye wrote:
> > On Tue, Apr 15, 2003 at 09:36:55AM -0400, John Straiton wrote:
> > > I have a machine that was working fine but then upon 
> reboot one day 
> > > it failed to come up on it's own. I tinkered a little bit 
> and then 
> > > finally just settled on trying a make world/kernel. Upon 
> retrying it 
> > > this morning I see this right after it detected the CDRom drive 
> > > (same error as before):
> > > 
> > > Apr 15 13:26:28 init: login_getclass: unknown class 'daemon'
> > > /etc/rc: Can't open /etc/rc: No such file or directory
> > > Apr 15 13:26:28 init: /etc/spwd.db: No such file or 
> directory Enter 
> > > full pathname of shell or RETURN for /bin/sh:
> > > 
> > > Then I just
> > > #/sbin/mount /dev/da0s1f /etc
> > > #/sbin/mount -a
> > > #exit
> > > 
> > > And we're back up and running.
> > > 
> > > Ideas? I couldn't find an example of this question actually being 
> > > answered (tho' it's been brought up before) in the list yet. The 
> > > only one that seemed answered involved someone who had 
> put /etc on 
> > > another drive but as you can see:
> > > 
> > > /dev/da0s1a                291M   105M   162M    39%    /
> > > /dev/da0s1f                7.1G    26M   6.5G     0%    /etc
> > > 
> > > Same drive.
> > 
> > But, significantly, different partition...
> 
> Sorry, sent that without any real thought.
> 
> To get this far, the bootloader has managed to mount the root 
> file system. In order for the system to come up the rest of 
> the way, certain things must be located on the root 
> partition, including /etc - without it, init is not able to 
> call /etc/rc, which in turn means that /etc/fstab, all your
> /etc/rc.* scripts etc are not available.  The login_getclass 
> error above occurs because init cannot find /etc/login.conf.
> 
> So, your root file system should include /etc, /bin, /sbin, 
> /dev, so that 
> things like /sbin/mount, and all your devices etc are 
> available to complete the startup procedure.
> 
> init will quite happily call /etc/rc once you have manually 
> mounted all your local file systems, because it can now find 
> everything it needs.
> 
> If you have previously managed to get it running like this in 
> the past, I am sure I don't know how ;-)
> 
> Dan


Thanks Dan. After getting an opportunity to put /etc back into / (as
opposed to it's own slice) and then rebooting, that has corrected the
problem.

Lesson learned: /etc can not exist outside the / slice. At least for
those of us who don't know a way around the problems inheirent with it.

John Straiton
jks at clickcom.com
Clickcom, Inc
704-365-9970x101