None of the files in ' var / log ' are what I'm looking for. None of them match what I see on the screen upon boot up. I have created my own file with ' dmesg > boot.txt ', and it confirms this.

My screen go's by quickly, but I can see enough of it to know that this is true. I see quite a few things going wrong on boot, and none of it shows up in my file ' boot.txt ' or ' messages ' in var/log .

Does anyone know how I can get an exact copy of the boot screen ?

JC

dmesg and message files

Yeah jayakrishnan is right. I failed to realize from your previous post that there is a file(/var/log/dmesg) that has what you need.

Sorry about that.

Look guys, I don't know what is going on here, but I can assure you that I DO NOT SEE what happens on the screen during boot, in ' var/log/messages ' OR , at the prompt , typing ' dmesg ' .

I hope that clears things up. What you have mentioned is NOT what I am looking for.

It is not my imagination. I see things on the boot screen that DO NOT appear in either of those files. And I really need to see the EXACT contents of the boot screen so that I can track down some problems.

I do not know why the things that I see are not in there. I'm new to Linux (2 1/2 months). But I can promise you that I am correct with my observations.

For example: " Can't locate device number or fs type "
and: " devpnts has wrong device number or fs type. devpnts not supported."

I wrote both of those statements after seeing them on the boot screen. I saw it with my own eyes, and wrote it down. Neither of those statements appear ANYWHERE in ANY of the files in ' var/log/ ', so please stop telling me to look at things which I know do not contain what I am looking for.

I don't know if there is any difference between what Slack does, and what Redhat does ( I noticed that both of you have Redhat), but I know that I am right in what I have stated.

Thank you,

JC

I am also looking for the same answer. I have never been able to locate this info either.

At last ! Someone who is in the same boat. What I think that I have come up with so far is that there is a size limit on the file that ' dmeg ' displays. When I look at mine, it is obvious that it is cut off at the end of it.

I just wish that I knew where to change the size limit.

JC

What do you want to see the little green okays?

"What do you want to see the little green okays ?"

Well Crashed_Again, that would not be possible for me, since I am running Slack 9.0. From what I've seen you only see that stuff in Redat, Suse, Mandrake etc.

So no, those don't interest me.
Solving my problems, does however interest me.

JC

dmesg will print all the boot messages "up to the point where you enter your chosen runlevel". In distros other than slack, this is the point where green OK's and DONE's will start to be printed on the screen. The log that dmesg prints will continue to be appended through the session as certain hardware is accessed. This log is best for diagnosing hardware issues.

So, yes, dmesg will present only a partial list of the messeges you see at boot.

If the errors you see are not shown with dmesg, then I believe that your problems are comming from the services loaded by your chosen runlevel (3 or 4 for slack)

unfortunately, while I can find these logs in redhat (boot.log) and suse (boot.msg) I cannot find it in slack. Perhaps slack has to be told to log these messages - I just don't know.

What system logger does slackware use?

Well I don't know how its done in slackware but I would imagine that if its not in /var/log then theres no record of it at all. I was under the impression that ALL log files are kept within that directory. Of course, I'm only familiar with RedHat.

You grep'ed /var/log for that message and it didn't turn up anything?

grep -r devpnts /var/log/*

Ahhh you probably already did that.

/var/log/messages *should* be displaying what you are looking for. You can also check /var/log/syslog

Note times, that will help you more than words...

Cool

As I said I have the same but am on Debian. There must be a way of generating a "boot.log" which would record the messages generated by the boot process

my dmesg only records messages up to a point, but
i can't find anything that records the messages given
in reply to stuff in rc.local or other stuff close. I hate
the way redhat clears the screen before it puts up the
kernel and terminal stuff for the login screen. i spent
some time trying to figure out how to stop that a year ago
but failed. I'm using metalog now instead of syslog.
i guess i should do some grep searching, and then
check the metalog man page, but i haven't yet.

You would really have to edit the initrd that is set up by the boot manager. I don't know how Grub does it, but it might allow a log option. The main problems are that 1) dmesg can't write to a filesystem that hasn't been mounted, so there is a limited buffer space available to it before stuff falls off the tail end. 2) dmesg continously writes to the output file after having booted (dmesg is the kernel ring buffer control), and you don't want the file to get too large.
You have two solutions that I can think of:
1) edit the initrd and have it log to a file in ramdisk until the /var filesystem has been mounted, then dump the log (this is not for the faint hearted, as its one of the basics you need to really know before you can distribute your own boot disks.
2) increase the kernel ring buffer size, which might help, but will eventually fail simply because something will eventually fall off the stack (read the man page for dmesg).