My 'sandbox' partition boots up fine, starting all the early runlevel daemons/scripts correctly. However, when it begins 'entering runlevel 3', it just sits there, with no password prompt spawned. Going into a different runlevel doesn't help: it just stops at the same place.

I have recompiled and installed shadow (to ensure that agetty, init and login are all clean), as well as udev. My inittab lists the agetty location (/sbin) under PATH, and an example line is:
which appears to be sensible, though I have tried fiddling with, for example, getting it to autologin and get me a bash console, in case that helps (which it doesn't).

I can chroot into the partition from my 'working' one, but I can't seem to find any logs that would be helpful (is there such a log?), and can't find a way of getting init or agetty to be more verbose about what they're doing or what might be going wrong.

I am using Source Mage, if that helps. I can't seem to find a similar problem anywhere online, except in the case of a Xenserver setup which seems to be quite specific to that.

Thanks for any assistance.

Edited to add: changing virtual consoles doesn't work, it just stays where it is. But ctrl-alt-del does reboot.

I think the prompt is the last thing and it can be locked earlier not just in agetty. Have you tried to wait a bit, maybe a timeout will solve it?

Timeout doesn't help, it just sits there.

Have tried using mingetty -- same thing. Using qlogin just gives the 'respawning too fast' error. So something seems to be stopping the getty types from actually getting a tty. My /dev tree seems to be created correctly. Perhaps this is some sort of permissions issue?

Am currently fiddling with 'upstart' as an alternative init system, which may be a workaround, though a lot of PT for what might be a simple problem.

Hullo!

Are you solved this problem? I have exactly the same problem.