I have a rh9 install at work, get it set up for a server. today i came in an logged in remote with ssh from my desk. first problem was when I logged on, I got 4 or 5 errors from bash, saying /dev/null permission denied. Also got 2 of these errors when trying to start mozilla (tunnelled), but was able to run mozilla as root. I tried a reboot (10+ years of Microsquish training at work), and come up with /dev/null read only at boot. I enter the rescue prompt, and try to run fsck, but am told that /proc is not mounted. I booted from cd into rescue mode, chrooted the file system, and fsck, but it did not fix the problem. Niether did chmod /dev/null 777. The final error in boot is as follows:

awk: cmd. line:2: fata: cannot open file '/proc/mounts'/ fro reading (no such file or directory)
Checking root filesystem
dup2: Bad file descriptor [FAILDED]


thanks for any help, we have been using this box for our cvs, would not like to lose a weeks worth of work.

Check your fstab. Is there a line that looks like this?
If not, try adding that line to get /proc to mount at boot time.

yes there is, the fstab is as follows:

LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hda3 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0

I have the HD in M$ machine, save what we need off it. Actually, this is a lightweight box, we are using as a learning experience before we get the actual server. It turns out that this machine (actually the whole batch it was in) have various h/w problems. This is prob due to a failure somewhere in the HD.

thanks for the help