Deleted /sbin/init ... recovered from live CD, still will not boot?
 

Hi all,

Been messing around with my CentOS 6.6 VM trying to break stuff and learn with it. I thought it may be a good learning exercise to (ok, sounds a bit stupid, but purposely) delete /sbin/init to see how I could recover and learn.

I've booted into a recovery CD and recovered the /sbin/init file to my existing directory, however, I'm still having issues booting the machine.

Per Google suggestions, I have given the new init file 755 permissions but it still does not boot.

I apologize that I have not had more ideas, I am currently Googling solutions but am having a bit of trouble knowing where to start. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, thank you.

Is this the correct /sbin/init binary for your system?
How does the boot fail?
Was there anything damaged beside removing one file?
What if you use boot parameter init=/bin/sash (assuming you have that file) ?

Did you restore the /sbin/init to the right directory - as the machine will see it when booting from disk?

Did you set the appropriate security label on it? I think (not sure as I don't have a Centos 6 installation) it should be system_u:object_r:init_exec_t:s0

From my Fedora box
$ ls -lZ /sbin/init
lrwxrwxrwx. root root system_u : object_r : bin_t : s0 /sbin/init -> ../lib/systemd/systemd

How big is that "recovered" /sbin/init? The /sbin/init (41920 bytes) in the installer image is very different from the installed /sbin/init (150352 bytes). What you need to do from the recovery CD/DVD is chroot to /mnt/sysimage and run "yum reinstall upstart". That should get you a proper /sbin/init. There is only one customizable file (/etc/dbus-1/system.d/Upstart.conf) in the upstart package, so there should be no problem there.

Perhaps?

CentOS 6.6 does not use systemd.