Hello.

I'm trying to "repair" a Debian Lenny server a friend of mine had installed and working fine, all of a sudden he calls and tells me the server doesn't boot. He's getting this error messege:

/bin/sh: can't access tty; job control turned off (initramfs)

I've googled and find a lot of stuff about it but for ubuntu. The server was working fine for about a year.

Now, he just called and told me he installed another one he had as backup and the samething happened to that one. Weird....

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advanced for your time.

Are you able to get into a terminal to type commands at all?

If not boot to a live disk. Mount the server drive.

Then print the log file of the server and post it here.

Note: /var/log/ folder will be within a drive path under /media or /mnt if you're using a live disk. That command prints the last 100 lines of the log. We may need to dig deeper but lets start with that.