Hello,

I get this message when I am using the linux text mode and It is deactivated so how can resolve this problem.

INIT: id "co" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

Thank you

i just find how to resolve it , just editing /etc/inittab and see what wrong in that file if there is a line which is wrong i put comment on it and save. Then after i run this command init q to restart inittab to be able to take effect I made.

Hi,
I am having the same problem. I went through several posts on net but couldn't get the exact point.
Can you please suggest, how can I know which line in /etc/inittab is wrong?
Thanks a lot.
Regards,
Badri.

Hi Badri

I think the line that uxan is referring to is the one similar to this :

co:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty ttyS0 9600 vt100-nav

It is used to create a tty login session to ttyS0 which should be the serial console port on your server.
By commenting this out and entering "init q", the error should disappear, however, you will no longer have a login prompt via your LOM (if configured). I understand that a similar entry exists for use with Xen, but the ttyS0 will be different.
I am still looking into this issue and if I resolve then I will update the post.
Regards

Graham

Your version of Linux wants to see the "ttys0" or "S1" format to identify the default serial console device. Maybe you upgraded to a secure version... maybe you switched distributions... or maybe someone inserted code from some Q and A website without understanding it. But, the reply below was correct (put a hash mark at the beginning of the line, to comment it out, because it's not doing anything useful on your current version of Linux).

Look at the other lines in the file. Do you have other lines with the agetty command? That's probably doing what you need already, if your serial console is working.

In my case, I had the old style, but invoking the secure version of the OS required a different syntax. I kept the old one, commented out and added further comment, so that the next sysadmin won't remove the comment mark by mistake. Part of my inittab look like this...

# Run gettys in standard runlevels
S1:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty -L ttyS1 9600n8 vt100
#co:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty ttyS0 9600 vt100-nav #Line above used instead of this line for console redirection.
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1
2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty2
3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty3

Hoping you have happy consoles,
-Zonker-

Thanks but before you post please look at the date. Unless the information you provide is complete and current (and not just asking the OP a question for example) posting responses to stale threads is commonly frowned upon. So please be careful.