Hi

I have Red Hat Linux 9.0

It was working fine

Suddenly Today WHen I restarted I was not able to boot my System

I went on and I recieve the following errors


INIT: cannot execute "/etc/X11/prefdm"
<repeat above error 9 times>

INIT: Id "x" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

I do not know what to do

Then suddenly i get the command prompt and able to login in

But when I give startx i am not able to do so it returns with error

And again after some times I get

the same error
INIT: cannot execute "/etc/X11/prefdm"

I do not know why ths is happening

i also tried with rescue mode operation with Linux CD but failed

Can anyone tell me how to solve it becuase all my data are inside


Regards
Sabeer

it seems something is wrong with your X11 systems (graphics user interface/GUI), hence why you are given a command, prompt because it can't generate your graphical environment.

The only thing i could suggest is a reinstall of linux, to refresh and overwrite any changes made to your X11 files which caused this to happen. If you have a seperate partition for your /home, then your data will be safe.

Other wise you'll have to find some way of backing up, prehaps from the command line interface, by moving the data/files to another partition (or floppy if you don't have lot of files) using the mv command, and mounting the partition.

If you have windows installed then you can use partition magic to create a logical partition, for your backup.

I hope i was some help...? If anyone else has any better ideas then suggest them!

there is just one thing I'm wondering about..

how did you mess up your system? did you install another package, or are you always logged in as root?

Simply try to run runlevel 3