Hi everone,

I have been experiencing this issue for 48hours now.

I did openSuse Online updates, rebooted the system I got the following error on the reboot.

/etc/initscript: line 106: /sbin/mingetty: Input/Output error
INIT: Id "1" respawing too fast: disabled for 5 minutes.

include All Ids from 1 to 6.

I even made a new installation with and without online updates. I still got the same error.


I am seeking help.


Thank you.

Not real familiar with initscript but the man page here talks about it:
http://linux.die.net/man/5/initscript

The mention there of /etc/inittab makes sense of your message to me.

In /etc/inittab you'll see lines that have the word "respawn" in them.
respawn means start the process and every time it dies start it again.

"respawning too fast" is an indication that the process is dieing every time it starts.

So the first thing you want to do is "vi /etc/inittab" and look for the mingetty items that are set to respawn. You can change those to "off" then save the file. Typically you would then type "init q" to reread the inittab. (I'm not sure how this works with initscript because it isn't on any of the systems I'm familiar with.) This should stop the error long enough for you to determine why the command being run is failing.

Once you've done that you can test the command from /etc/inittab to see what errors it is giving. Once you've figured out why the command is erroring out and resolved it you can change the entries back from off to respawn.

What your system is saying ... the mingetty process is failing to open your virtual consoles.

The virtual consoles are /dev/tty1 through /dev/tty6 ... on your system, based on the message you are reporting.

Somehow these devices are not active ... the mingetty process is configured to respawn ... but since it fails to open the device it errors out. The system is recognizing a run-away process loop and is putting a 5 minute halt on it.

You have to find out why your virtual console devices cannot be opened.

Thanks for your input.

I want to mention that I am new to linux.

When you say 'device', which device you mean? is a hardware device?

Also I want to mention that if I reformat the hard drive and perform a new suse installtion why the problem would still exist? I found this very odd.

Finaly, when you reformat the hard drive is there any chance that the bootup process still be alive?

Thank you again.

chelsea

He means the /dev/tty1 etc... - items in the /dev directory are considered "device files". These items have major/minor numbers rather than size information like regular files. The major tells which class of device is involved and the minor can distinguish separate physical devices and/or tell which features of the devices are to be used.

The main issue is that mingetty can't do what it is trying to do. A first step would be to do "ls -l /dev/tty*" to see if the device files exist. There are many other steps you should research. Try typing "man mingetty" and/or "info mingetty" to get more details on what that command does.

Example ... displaying the virtual console devices /dev/tty0 - 9
You should see these devices.

Display the /etc/inittab entries for mingetty
In my example I use agetty ... so just replace "agetty" with "mingetty" when you use the grep command: