HELP! How to recover /etc/inittab? Accidently renamed it.

Arodef · 11-20-2007, 02:18 PM

I accidently renamed /etc/inittab to /etc/inittab.bak without replacing it. After rebooting, it complains it can't find /etc/inittab and doesn't boot up. I tried booting from a live CD and I can see the file but the filesystem is read only so I can't rename.

How can I rename that file? Thanks!

ehawk · 11-20-2007, 02:42 PM

With most live-evaluation CDs, you can mount the hard drive in such a way that you have write permission. If you can bring the hard drive up as an icon in some file manager or desktop display, you might be able to right click it and change the permissions. Which live-evaluation CD are you using? You should probably also post this thread to a forum specifically dealing with that live-evaluation distro.

jphilput · 11-20-2007, 02:42 PM

You'll need to mount the appropriate drive as read/write. Frequently, live CDs will allow you to modify the hard drive with a command like

Code:

chroot /mnt/sysimage

The actual command will depend on which live CD you're using. If the chroot command is not available, you should be able to unmount the drive with the umount command

Code:

umount mountpoint

and then re-mount the partition with the mount command

Code:

mount -O rw device mountpoint

Arodef · 11-20-2007, 03:21 PM

Thanks for the pointers. I have a CentOS 5 (x86_64) system, I'm using the CentOS 5 i386 Live CD since a 64bit liveCD doesn't exist for it, hope that doesn't cause any problems. I'll give it a shot now.