My system shut down cleanly last night. This morning, on booting I get a lot of messages saying that libpcre.so.3 cannot be found.

then:
grep: error while loading shared libraries: libpcre.so.3: cannot open shared object: no such file or directory

later:

etc/rcS.d/S48console-session.sh:line 36: cut: command not found
etc/rcS.d/S48console-session.sh:line 36: [: =: unary operator expected

The system then spends a long time at:
Starting syslog log daemon: syslogd

Then it boots to a console prompt. When I log in it cannot find my home directory.

Most commands do not work. su cd and init 0 do work.

System has 3 Hard discs:

hda: Windows 2000
hdb: Mandrake 10.1
sda: Debian.

I can boot Mandrake and mount sda. All files and directories are there and readable.

Please can anyone tell me what to try now?

sounds alot like a hdd problem.

Boot upmandrake, and then mount the debian drive.
Then:
play around, use it, any problems?

chroot will take you into your debian filesystem, so if any lib under it is corrupted, then the tools there will wet their pants all the same. If not, then the hdd is intact and it must be the kernel wetting its pants, or something entirely different.. (:

The hard disc seems OK. I was able to mount it and read files. Even looked at the logs. Nothing was logged this morning - probably because syslogd would not start.

Yesterday I upgraded whatever patches were going. I wonder if that caused the problem (using unstable).

Another thing is that I removed the original 2.6.8 kernel (uninstalled, not purged), leaving 2.6.12 and 2.6.14. However I've not booted from 2.6.8 since about day 2 that I installed Debian as it was one of the first things I upgraded.

Will try your suggestion as soon as I can, hopefully beteewn getting home and having to go out again an hour later, in 9 hours time. Thanks

Let me guess... you have /usr as it's own partition?

There's a problem with grep where it looks for files (needlessly) under /usr, and since it hasn't been mounted yet, fails to find them and barfs all over the place. It's been fixed, but not yet uploaded to the repositories. Once you're able to get booted up, login as root, manually mount the necessary partitions and play with your net connection - I had to manually ifup eth0 in my case, and wasn't even able to start KDE, so it was all CLI for me.
Downgrade to the previous version of grep (2.5.1.ds2-2) and don't update grep again until 2.5.1.ds2-4 is in and you should be ok.

Welcome to Sid :o)

HTH

Many Thanks! Grep was the problem.

Starnge thing though, I usually use Synaptic. When I used aptitude in insisted on removing a number of files it claimed were unneeded. I finally let it go on, figuring that I could always reinstall what I wanted. However one of the packages it removed was Synaptic.

However, I'm back up and running and it's half past midnight so it's powerdown time.

Thanks again.

I too am having the exact same problem

Thanks for the tip. I was trying initscripts as only the root partition was being mounted, and I have /home /var /tmp and /usr on seperate partitions.

After logging in (as root) the following does work if you must run X and to get stuff working.

mount -a (get those partitions working)
ldconfig (all those lovely 'new' libraries to use)
then kdm (or however you start an X session)

anyway, now I am off to fix the problem hopefully.

Thanks for the help, glad to see it wasn't only me and that front fascia of my comp is safe for another day*


*percussive technology