Somehow, your /dev/console file must have been accidentally deleted. It is pretty easy to fix.
Boot into Fedora.
Then mount /dev/sda1 to somewhere (say /mnt/sda1)
Then, make sure sda1 is the correct partition: An `ls /mnt/sda1' should show Debian's root directory for your debian system (directories for boot, bin, dev, etc, home, lib, etc.). The important one here is dev.
Now, look to see what's on Debian's /dev directory: issue the `ls -l /mnt/sda1/dev'. The expected result is to have either nothing, or have only one or two files (none of which are not /mnt/sda1/dev/console).
Linux requires three `persistent' character files before it boots up. The rest are generated after init has loaded. These files (and their maj/min numbers) are /dev/console (5 1), /dev/null (1 3), and /dev/zero (1 5). You can create them (the ones that don't exist) like so:
Code:
$ mknod /mnt/sda1/dev/console c 5 1
$ mknod /mnt/sda1/dev/null c 1 3
$ mknod /mnt/sda1/dev/zero c 1 5
Now Debian should be able to load correctly. If, after restarting Debian, the same thing happens again, then there is a problem in the startup or shutdown scripts somewhere.
