Redhat Booting Problem

[vich00ss]

guyz.....

I am getting the following error while i am booting one of my server. Unfortunately i cant able to format this server because some third party application is running on it.... What will be the reason?? any hopeful solutions.....????

Error:

INIT: can not execute /etc/X11/prefdm
INIT: can not execute /sbin/mingetty
INIT Id “1” respawning too fast: disable for 5 minutes
INIT Id “2” respawning too fast: disable for 5 minutes
INIT Id “3” respawning too fast: disable for 5 minutes
INIT Id “4” respawning too fast: disable for 5 minutes
INIT Id “5” respawning too fast: disable for 5 minutes
No more processes left in this runlevel

[Roxoff]

The problem here is that your X server is failing for some reason. I've not seen this error for a few years, but I would get it regularly on my old Fedora Core and RedHat 9-ish installs when the kernel was upgraded and I needed to manually build the nVidia graphics driver. You probably need to update your nVidia or ATI drivers for the video card to solve this properly, but there are alternatives.

As it's a server, you probably aren't relying on the graphics performance much. You might want to consider using a generic video driver such as the vesa one, or even consider running with no graphical login whatsoever (i.e. use runlevel 3 instead of runlevel 5 on a RedHat system), users can still use X, they just log in using the text console and run startx when they need to.

[atreyu]

INIT: can not execute /etc/X11/prefdm

That one is peculiar. Does the file exist? Is it executable? See if it has been modified:

rpm -qV initscripts

[Mudgen]

Good remarks so far. It would be useful to know what version of Red Hat/Fedora this is. /etc/X11/prefdm should exist and should be mode 755 in F14, F15, and RHEL 5.7. Just checked those on my systems.

[vich00ss]

Actually the server is belongs to one of the Premium Institution in India. Runlevel 3 is not affordable coz we are using one graphical tool for cluster management.

OS ver. RHEL 5.1.

[vich00ss]

@Atreyu.: Unfortunately i cant able to check it today. coz today is our local holiday. I will definitely update you the file is existing or not.. Thank you all....

[Mudgen]

Actually the server is belongs to one of the Premium Institution in India. Runlevel 3 is not affordable coz we are using one graphical tool for cluster management.

OS ver. RHEL 5.1.

Then you should definitely have prefdm.

Need for a gui tool does not preclude runlevel 3. You can shell in and pull the display back to any X-capable desktop. Or even another console that's running X. I use Xming/Putty on the Windows desktop that I'm required to have.

[vich00ss]

actually the worst fact is this server is not even booting in <b>single user mode</b>. there also we are getting the same error.

[Mudgen]

Can you boot "linux rescue" from CD 1 of the install disks (or the DVD)? If you can do that, you can edit /mnt/sysimage/etc/inittab and change
id:5:initdefault:
to
id:3:initdefault:
and try booting that way. As I pointed out, not running in level 5 does not preclude you from running GUI programs displayed elsewhere.

I suspect, though, that you have severely corrupted / and/or /boot filesystems and are looking at a system restore, perhaps on different hardware. If you see / mount as readonly, /bin/bash not executable when logging in, etc, that's probably the case.

[atreyu]

actually the worst fact is this server is not even booting in <b>single user mode</b>. there also we are getting the same error.

The fact that you get the same error when you are in single user mode does not make sense. Single user mode flat out will not attempt to start X. It won't even start networking or normal services and daemons. How did you attempt to boot into single user mode?

Anyway, Mudgen's suggestion should work for you and more importantly, he brings up a good point: you probably don't need to be running your server in a graphical mode in the first place. Perform all your graphical server tasks by exporting displays back to Linux workstations. It is a waste of resources, opens up extra security holes, and tempts users to log in and break stuff.