Never Ending Boot Cycle

[iamchachi]

I have been searching around here for information on how to fix a problem I am having and at this point, I figured I would post.

To make a long story short, it looks like there was some sort of compromise to my debian system a few weeks ago. I was using the machine as a dev box for web apps and running a couple of non-critical websites on it. Anyway, I had some junk installed by a friend one day (Tomcat, openexchange, etc) and needless to say I think that opened up a bunch of holes for the cracker kiddies. After my ISP contacted me to let me know that my line utilization was extremely high, I installed portsentry and did a little tweaking...as much as I could. I am no linux admin unfortunately. So, I got another email from him tonight after I watched the box for about 5 days and noticed that portsentry had banned a couple of hundred IPs in addition to the subnet that I manually denied.

Well, tonight I got an email from the network guy again and my line utilization had gone up. Now I figured it was time for me to start shutting off services. I installed sysv-rc-conf and started to work my way through the services that I did not think I needed. I spent a long time researching, or trying to research, the services that I found in there and that were booting. When I rebooted the first time, I could not log in on the console, told me that the system was still booting. Could not log in as root on the console. Tried to SSH in, no love, same system is booting message. I shut the system down from the console and fired it up in recovery mode, tried to re-enable a few services (rc and rcS) as I read something somewhere and can't remember what at this point.

To make this long-story short, the system now goes into a never ending cycle when booting in regular or recovery mode. I can get to the grub prompt, but I don't know what the heck to do there. After 30 attempts it checks the file system and goes back into the cycle. Good times.

I have files that I would like to get off of the machine at this point, and if I could get it so that I can tar up a few directories and email them to myself, I would probably be able to do a clean install.

Any help or questions are much appreciated.

Thanks,

Jason

[objuan]

try this to get you in so you can copy your files
from grub high light recover mode press "e" enter
next page scroll down to the kernel image press "e" enter
and at the end of the line change the ,ro to rw init/bin/bash press enter
press "b" to boot. this will put you into the file root file system .
now tar up and copy your files. if this works the you can also
edit you /etc/inittab its possible it is jacked up.

[muha]

Use a livecd like knoppix -> http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

[iamchachi]

thanks for your replies. I have been messing with Knoppix today. I am having trouble mounting the drive. I can see it and all of the files on it, with testdisk...which says it is hda1. But, I can't seem to get it mounted.

[objuan]

If you can see the disk and the files on it then it is mounted

[iamchachi]

I figured that would be coming soon. I hope it is really that easy.

mount | grep hda outputs nothing

yet

sudo mount /dev/hda1 /hda1 tells me that /dev/hda1 is already mounted or /hda1 is busy.

I have to go postal on a few people real quick. Then I will be back.

[iamchachi]

try this to get you in so you can copy your files
from grub high light recover mode press "e" enter
next page scroll down to the kernel image press "e" enter
and at the end of the line change the ,ro to rw init/bin/bash press enter
press "b" to boot. this will put you into the file root file system .
now tar up and copy your files. if this works the you can also
edit you /etc/inittab its possible it is jacked up.

By the way, I tried this and the never ending cycle continued. The only thing I see fly by that looks bad are:

cannot find module psmouse

udev requires a kernel >= 2.6.8, not started

[iamchachi]

Well, this has been a very trying process. I thank everyone for helping or trying. For whatever reason, Knoppix did not recognize the drive or let me mount it. At this point, I am sure there is some low-level conflict or bug with Knoppix and my hardware. But, I have no idea.

I was able to retrieve the files by using a Mepis 6.0 Live CD. This was no cake walk either as I was able to mount the drive with mount /dev/hda1 straight away...just that the network config would not use my static info for more than 10 seconds before it switched back. This was trying to say the least. I finally realized that I had a small USB memory stick that Google sent me last year. I popped it in, mounted it with mount /dev/sda1 and boom. I copied the files I needed to it in a few minutes and now my blood pressure is coming back down.

Like I said, I don't know what the problem was with mounting my internal HDD, but maybe someone who runs into this in the future may have success with Mepis 6.0.

[muha]

... and now my blood pressure is coming back down.

That's good to hear