I am running SLES9 on z990 under z/VM. What started me on my problem is, after a boot, I do not get a login prompt at the z/VM Linux 3270 console. I did a ps -ef and did not see any mingetty processes running. I issued a telinit 3 command from an ssh session and mingetty is not running and I can get a login prompt at the console. So, then my issue becomes why don't I have mingetty running after boot. So, I rebooted and issued a runlevel command and it came back with UNKNOWN. The default runlevel is set to 3 in inittab but for some reason during boot it never gets there. How can I figure out why boot is ending up in UNKNOWN runlevel which seems to be causing certain processes not to start?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Regards,
Tom

I think it's the other way around. Certain services are failing to start so it doesn't reach runlevel 3.
Examine the logs, and see which services in /etc/init.d/rc.3/ start and which don't.

1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --noclear tty1
2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty2
3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty3
Mingetty should be running in a number of runlevels. It is started by init directly, and not in one of the rc.N scripts.