Ok....so I've been toolin' around...looking for some answers on this. I'm finding a number of others have seen this issue and there are lots of postings.....but alas, no description of likely causes and in most cases, no description of the resolution!
In my case, I have a RedHat Linux Advanced Server system with the original 2.4.9-e.3 kernel from the install which no longer boots. The messages which post at boot time say something like, ID "6" blabla ... respawning too fast pausing for 5 minutes. After 5 minutes, the same bunch of messages scrolls through and this will continue indefinitely.=O( It also babbles something of "/etc/initscript"....
Anyway, this is very frustrating and I cannot figure out where to go from here -- best I've been able to do so far is mv /etc/initscript to /etc/initscript.bak (ie, get it out of the way) and then I can boot to init 1. Moving to init 2 seems to be ok....but moving to init 3 seems to stall at "Bringing up interface lo:"....
Last stuff I did to my poor little Linux box was install PHPNuke, php4.???, mysql?.?.?, and I think that is all. But, since my box was rooted, it is possible someone hacked it (don't ask me why) and hosed it up for me!? Anyway, if anyone has some thoughts on this I would appreciate it! =O)

Thanks,
Rob

that respawning stuff is when a program like getty
or mingetty is set to restart whenever it gets stopped
or isn't running gets messed up. the system keeps trying
to restart the program, but it can't restart it cause it isn't
there or it's messed up.
you can get that from stuff getting deleted or corrupted, or
the filesystem corrupted, or the computer over-overclocked.

Hmmm....so I've done fsck to all my partitions from linux rescue....how can I trouble shoot the init process to have it skip whatever it is getting stuck on? At this point, I'm thinking of just moving my data over to another partition and then just rebuild the OS -- but this is more work than I should have to do -- I think.!? :O(

Thanks,
Rob

the easy thing to do would be to restore a recent
backup, but if you had that, you wouldn't be here.

my way of doing that is to restore a recent backup, and
in turn link different directories from the backup to
to the messed up version, until i find out where the
problem is. like i will softlink the /usr from the other
partition to the current user, and maybe edit fstab if
necessary, then reboot and see what works.
you might just be missing something in /lib

you just have to figure out what is the least trouble for
you.

maybe make alist of files on your system for next time
so you can compare
ls -lR >> /filelist.txt
or find >> /filelist.txt
whatever you like

in your case it's probably best just to back up
/home /root /var /etc and then rebuild
maybe /boot and /lib if you have custom kernels