Hey guys. I'm pretty much stumped on this one.

I decided to comment out Redhat's code for setting the system font out of rc.sysinit because it takes away my penguin on my high-res console. However, I inadvertantly hosed rc.sysinit, and now my system hangs on "starting syslog."

So I tried to get around this by passing params to my kernel such as: "emergency" "single" and "rescue" but to no avail. I can get a single user prompt, but the / filesystem is mounted in readonly mode (automatically on boot), and therefore I can't change back rc.sysinit. Unfortunately, I can't unmount /. When I type umount / nothing happens... so I can't manage to get the filesystem to come back in a writeable mode. I even have a bootdisk, but it tries to use the rc files from the h/d so the situation does not change.

Anyway, I would appreciate help on this issue... basically I need to get my filesystem back in read/write mode so I can fix the stuff.

Thanks folks,
Andrew

You might get lucky and someone has a miracle cure for you. From what I see, if you weren't a big believer in backups, you probably will become a fanatic for them.

Boot the Red Hat CD and see if you can use it's rescue capability to start your system.

If not, try a Custom reinstall with no partitioning or extra software install.

Good luck

Hmm... well I beleive that there has to be a way to get a read/write mount (at least with a bootdisk) without loading my drive's rc.sysinit. Otherwise it would be impossible debug the init files unless they were on another drive...

Unfortunately I don't have the Redhat CD as I did a 'net install on my machine. Thanks for the suggestion though

Why don't you use a mini linux distro? Get one of them linux distro's that fit on a floppy and boot from that. Or if you have a knoppix cd lying around some where, use that.

Use:

mount -oremount,rw /

This will umount/mount the named filesystem with the new options.

Malicious, thanks for the tip!

I was unawaure of how to to that. I was reading the man files for mount and umount, but it seems I could not unmount the file system because it was my root filesystem. But if mount has an option for remounting, thats great.

Anyway, I fixed this problem using a Mandrake 8.1 disk I had laying around. If anyone wants to know I hated Mandrake, its like all the stuff most people complain about Redhat except worse!