RedHat 6.0 installation will not boot
 

I am trying to help a client with an old installation of RedHat that will not boot. It starts a LILO boot, but gives me these error messages and then stops:

INIT: version 2.74 booting
INIT: No inittab file found
INIT: can't open(/etc/ioctl.save, O_WRONLY): No such file or directory

Enter runlevel:

The only runlevel it will accept is S (all other entries give me a no more processes at this runlevel and hang)

Using runlevel s, I get a bash prompt, but I am missing the /etc directory, so I cannot do anything. I cannot copy etc from another location as the system tells me it is read only.

The client shipped the computer to me, so I have limited resources to get it back up and running.

I have a redhat 6.0 installation disk, but that only seems to want to install or upgrade, and when I tried to upgrade it tells me the root device is not a valid root partition.

I have run e2fsck on all partitions and they are all clean.

Any help you can give me would be greatly appreciated.

The key is that it cannot find inittab. That suggests some corruption which could easily go past just one file.

The only reasonable solution for me would be to copy the data, and then install a more modern version of Linux**. If that's not an option, then simply re-install what you have.

We are always telling people how obsolete RH9 is. Rarely, we get questions on RH7.X RH6 is a first--my guess is that it is REALLY old.

Thanks
 

Thanks for the thoughts of things to try. It is an old machine and they just need a couple numbers off of it and then it will be retired.

Put the drive on another computer and retrieve the data??

I would think you could use a live-evaluation CD to cp from the hard drive. Sorry if there is something I am not getting:

http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php

Yep, try to boot from eg a Knoppix CD and retrieve the data.