open(/dev/console): Input/Output error

Hi,
I'm trying to boot a Linux system on a Single board Computer (Soekris net4521). I'm using a Slackware root file system and the 2.4.29 kernel. I'm looking at the normal console information through the serial port ttyS0 using minicom. In the last few seconds of the boot process the INIT process gives out the following message,
"open(/dev/console): Input/Output error"
I don't know what has gone wrong and I can't find anything using search engines.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

I do not really know what your problem may be, but after reading the responses to a google of your error message reveals that this error is caused by either a missing console driver in the kernel, or a misbehaving (or absent) getty process.

Hopefully this will give you an idea of where to start looking.

Any and all logs/debug info that might shed light on this might help someone to recognize your problem...

You are on the right trail. I solved the problem there yesterday. I should have posted the solution before now.
The process INIT draws on a file /etc/inittab for parameters. One of these parameters dictates what devices the console runs on, tty1, tty2 etc... ttys0 is commented out by default. After uncommenting this I got a logon prompt.
At this stage I found that I wasn't allowed logon as root even though I had the right username and password. Turned out that this was a closely related problem. In a file called /etc/securetty ttyS0 was also commented out meaning that any user on ttyS0 cannot log on as root.

Cheers for the reply
Fintan