/bin/sh: can't access tty; job control turned off
 

Hi folks,

I'm trying to run/install Xubuntu on my Sony Vaio PCG-505TS, but the boot process is getting stuck at the following error msj:
-------------------------------------------------------------
BusyBox v1.01 (Debian 1:1.01-4ubuntu3) Built-in shell (ash)
/bin/sh: can't access tty; job control turned off
#
-------------------------------------------------------------

I've googled a lot, but can't find a way to solve it. This link explains what the error means, but gives no solution to it: http://www.uclibc.org/FAQ.html#job_control

Can anyone please point me in the right direction? I'm getting frustrated... I can't wait to get linux running on my old vaio :(

Thank you for your help...

I had the same thing when I tried to encrypt my hard drive and used BusyBox for booting. This problem vanished when I disabled the job control in the busybox. Hope this helps.

Hi, thank you for your post.
So, how do I disable job control? ...isn't it already off, as for what the error message says?
Thanks

help
 

So, is this a software bug? I have the same problem with live CD UBUNTU !!!

first, shows the message : Mounting devices
then it shows: bin sh. cant access tty. Job control turned off etc.

I have a new PC with JMicron SATA disk 250 GB, without floppy drive and I m trying to install ubuntu.
Should i go for another distro. perhaps Suse 10?

I'm not sure on why that comes up as I haven't used ubuntu that much. You could try the openSuSE as I think it has the best hardware detection of all the distros. It's very newbie-friendly too :)

Thank you very much, Zmyrgel. :) I suppose OpenSuse is the right distro for me.

Hi there...

So, has anyone figured out this error yet? If you had, please share!

---------------------------------------------------------
BusyBox v1.01 (Debian 1:1.01-4ubuntu3) Built-in shell (ash)
/bin/sh: can't access tty; job control turned off
#
---------------------------------------------------------

So far it seems to be a common Ubuntu problem... I've tried xubuntu, fluxbuntu and Ubuntu Lite, to encounter the same error...

Here is another link which might be useful:

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=busy...1659426188&w=2

Best regards
Fred

Windows SUCKS, but there is nothing out there... thanks to Jmicron
 

Hi Fred,

So far, I 've only managed to install ubuntu into an older pc.
but it seems have hit a wall with my new motherboard!!!:rolleyes: Actually, jmicron is not supported by Linux. I hope, having a better luck later, trying kernel 2.6.18.

Yours,
Dimitris

dear ALL,

So, has anyone figured out this error yet? If you had, please share!

---------------------------------------------------------

Busybox V1.1.3(debian 1:1.1.3-2ubuntu3) buit -in

Enter "Help' for a list of built-in-comands



/bin/sh: can't acess tty: job control tunned off

(initramfs)


OS Ver :we have tried both Ubuntu and Kubuntu 6.10 version.

Motherboard details :
intel DQ965GF
Processor: E6300
HDD : ST380817AS.
CDROM: SAMSUNG SH_M522

regds
D.Thangaraj.

I too am a newbie who is having a similar problem with Ubuntu 6.10. I am trying to use linux on a sony pcg-c1xs with 64k memory. I was able to load a version of Mandrake 9.2 but it would say I lack resources and load what look like a desk top but no applications.

Same problem with kbuntu install on sony pcg-c1x

It would appear that no one who is any one in the Linux field read this forum.If there is one such person then he or she would be trying to figure out this problem. Being a nobody and an ignorant one at that I sure do not know how to fix or get around this.In my estimation this problem must be one of the basic problems that must certainly have been thought of before.
I guess Linux may not be ready for prime time yet!!

is posting flamebait really necessary?? :rolleyes:

anyhow, if *everyone* getting this error could post a description of their hardware i have a feeling it might be useful... my guess is that there's a certain type of hardware causing these errors... maybe you guys could boot a live cd and post the output of lspci and stuff like that to see if anyone spots a common denominator...

My idea: busybox is failing and so it leaves you to a console, which is not a tty and its why you get this message (to check if you are on a /dev/tty, type the command: tty)

So the problem is before this message, this is only a warning. And looking on google for this specific message will give you too many results.

What happens if you just hit ctrl-c ? Does it go on?

You have to look around, like
mount , check what the boot process managed to mount already. Maybe try to mount partitions manually.
Look for logs in /var/log if disks are detected and /var is already mounted,..
It's called debugging ;)

Mentionning the messages before this warning would help, as well as giving your hardware specifications..

I received the discussed error shortly after installing a second SATA 250GB HD with a primary NTFS partition and WinXP on it (inserted after Ubuntu install). Removing that second drive corrected the problem. I would like input on how to correct the problem. What is responsible for this malfunciton? I'm running Ubuntu 6.10 and afraid I'm kind of ignorant to the linux OS. Any help would be great. Thanks!

I got same error while booting an ubuntu 6.10 machine that worked fine before.

I used the ubuntu live CD to start it. (sorry for those who can't)
and by using:
sudo fdisk -l

I found that mysteriously the name of the hard drive had change.
Before it was hdb and now it is hda

So I mounted the hard drive and corrected the /boot/grub/menu.lst file
I changed
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.17-10-generic root=/dev/hdb1 ro quiet splash

for

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.17-10-generic root=/dev/hda1 ro quiet splash

and I did the same for the rescue mode
I reboot the machine and it worked fine again

So if that problem occur after an update or something, it may be good to investigate that option (Like DrewL, may be your trouble is similar)

For those who have this problem with the live CD I'm sorry it's probably different
so I wish you good luck

I have the same problem with connecting a new hard drive, could you go into step by step of how you mounted the hard drive and changed the name because when I ran sudo fdisk -l my hard drives names were changed.
Thank you

You have to modify /boot/grub/menu.lst.
For this, you will need to
boot with a livecd (knoppix is a good try)
mount your disk that contains the file /boot/grub/menu.lst that needs to be changed
edit (a->b or opposite?) and save
reboot on the harddrive.

Cafetero to mount your disk use the mount command

To have more info use
man mount

to mount your disk it look like this

sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/hda1 /mnt

-t ext3 -> its the files system. By default with ubuntu edgy it's ext3

/dev/hda1 -> replace it by the name of your linux partition (you saw it with fdisk -l)

/mnt -> where it will be mounted

When it's done look in the directory /mnt an all your file of your linux directory will be there.

so if you want to modify /boot/grub/menu.lst

it will be in /mnt/boot/grub/menu.lst

and use gedit or your favorite text editor to modify your menu.lst as I say in my previous post

and it should work




by the way when you add a new drive on an IDE bus make sure you have a master and a slave. It is set by using jumpers at the rear of your drive. You probably receive a note with your new hard drive that tells how.

in Linux hda is the master and hdb is the slave on the primary IDE bus, for the secondary master is hdc and slave is hdd.

In my case the problem was with the hard drive, the jumpers were correctly set to master but it was identifies as hdb. One day it begins switch between hda and hdb at every boot. Removing a jumper who was suppose to be in a storage position seems to have solve the problem. Now the hard drive is correctly call hda. I just hope it will stay that way.

I know what my probem was......
 

I have had this and fixed it. You mileage may vary of course especailly as my error was very specific.

I was building a persisten USB stick image of Xubunut 6.10.

Everything looked fine (though as it turned out I had ignored/missed a critical error). When I went to boot, it would get so far and then fail with the above error that everyone else has had.

As has been observed, this is unlikely to have anything to do with busybox or with ttys.

The first place to look once you get to the command prompt is at the log file. There may be no /var/log at this point in time so look in the casper.log file in the root filesystem type "more /casper.log" in my case there were a whle bunch of compaints about /dev/hdc (which can be ignored) followed by the key error a line that announced that the filesystem.squashfs file could not be loaded. If you have this then your installation media are probably corrupt.

In my case a CD that I had been using had somehow developed an error and the squashfs file (on the CD this is in /casper/filesystem.squashfs) which should have been 508M would not copy properly.

I resolved this by kicking myself as hard as I could, swearing a bit and then mounting the original iso file and using that to build my USB stick instead. Alternatively you could simply burn another CD from the original ISO.

I think the CD has a check CD option on the boot menu, try this and see what happens.

I don't know how many of you this will help but you could do a lot worse than to take a few minutes to verify your install media.

hope this helps

regards

Neil

I have been using ubuntu off and on sinse 5.04 Horay hedgeHog and haven't had any problems with my two year old asrock motherboard.

I have the same problem. In my case, i figure this out editing the file menu.lst (/boot/grub/menu.lst).

May be i had a different problem with only the same debug message, but i could see that this file was corrupted (in my case because a windows installation and grub-install command), and when i edited it the system boot up normally again.

My menu.lst file wants to boot up in (hd0,2) and /dev/hdc3, but the correct for was (hd0,1) /dev/hdc2

Note that the grub report errors in this situation, but if we have (hd0,1) /dev/hdc3 it will boot up with error (booting swap partition? rsrsrs, i don't know)

Check CD-ROM
 

Same error message due to an unsupported CD-Rom drive! I tried hard to get Xubuntu 6.10 on a P3-machine. As I used a CDRom-drive for installation reasons only, I took one, that was possibly older than me ;-) Next try of installig an older version of Ubuntu failed, due to lack of CDROM-support. So I changed it and was able to install both distibutions without any problem!

Problems installing or even booting Kubuntu edgy
 

Alright I've been tearing my hair out for days trying to get Vector or Xubuntu or Kubuntu installed (or even booted so I can test drive). However I keep coming up with these funky errors that seem to be so generic. Mainly it seems like it's a hardware issue. Did some searching but found jack squat. I too get the tty error busybox job control error thingamabob. So, heres my specs;

Intel core 2 duo E6300
Intel stock mobo
1 GB RAM
Dual double layer multi DVD drives
250 GB SATA ll
integrated X3000 graphics

Pretty standard. I also (before all of this) disconnected my secondary optical drive so it wouldn't interfere.
Please someone help!!!

I didn't upgrade or have any peripherals connected. The machine is about five months old and so many people are getting the same error for different reasons. I've tried various forums, reading tons of post and papers but nothing seems out of the ordinary with my machine. Very basic like I said before and someone needs to let the dev's know about this. Sorry for ranting but this is very frustrating.

making progress (?)
 

well I posted my hardware specs but.... Anyways it seems like I got a little further but I still get stuck with the same error. "Tty blah blah blah". This time before everything comes to a grinding halt it actually begins detecting my hardware. A miracle. Then blam santa claus hits a brick wall before he gets to 34th street with something about an intel e1000 network (driver I think). I have a desktop with intel mobo cpus and a 82562v networking device. Don't know why this is coming up but once again, any help is greatly appreciated by us lowly newbs.

As I said months ago (my post from December) and you said yesterday, this "can't access tty" error doesn't mean anything by itself so probably nobody will help you in this thread.

Any problem during bootup will lead to this warning.

My advice: This thread should not be used anymore.
Open a new thread in ubuntu detailing your Ubuntu version, how you installed it, HW specs again and the PREVIOUS ERRORS (if any), not this tty thingy.

I have no knowledge about your hardware and ubuntu, I can't help you.. sorry , but try to repost on another thread. If nobody can help you, Try on ubuntu forums directly.

Iran 6.10 for3 mounts before the problem showed up. I can't figure any reason unless a system update had a problem.

Same problem
 

I am also having the same problem.

However, I was able to run Ubuntu 6.10 from the CD on my old Dell P4, but when I try to run either Ubuntu 6.10 or 7.04 from the CD on my new machine, I get the same error message that you other people are getting.

/bin/sh: can't access tty; job control turned off (Initramfs)

The old machine was a 1.3Ghz Pentium 4 with one hard disk.

The new machine is running from a Intel DG965WH motherboard, Intel Core Duo E6600 with 2 GB of DDR2 800 RAM and two Seagate 250GB 7200 rpm SATAII hard drives with 16MB cache. The drives are set up as a RAID1 volume.

The optical drive that I am trying to run the CD from is the same drive from my old Dell machine, so I know that there is no problem with the DVD drive.

Ran the drive check, wasn't the problem
 

I ran the media check, but it found no errors.

I had Ubuntu 6.10 unitl yesterday, I was waiting for the new one for nothing.
I didn't change anything in my hardware and no one seems to know how to fix that.
Besides, I have a P4, 768Mhz RAM, two HDD; Linux is installed in the second partition of the slave, in the same place that I had the older version.
Regards and good luck, apparently we will need it...

After discussing along about it on ubuntuforums, I think its a problem with the controller IDE/SATA...

The beta cd of Ubuntu worked for me as for the others, but with the stable release it doesnt work...this is very weird

Finally I found a solution, maybe no so "technical" but worked from me: I re-install Ubuntu 6.10 and from there, I upgraded to 7.04 via update-manager -c.

i know is a little bit tricky, but works fine now.

hey I had the same problem I solved this by doing this ...

hope it helps !

Hi. I'm having the same problems, but I uploaded right from 6.10. I have been browsing around the forums for answers, but I honestly have not tried much.
I already mounted my partitions (they're named sda2...), but this is what I get:

title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.17-11-386
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.17-11-386 root=UUID=8a175020-0bd8-4cc8-ab7e-552cff9fef42 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.17-11-386
savedefault
boot

Therefore, I have no idea, where the mentioning of my partition is. Thanks for all the help.

I had the same problem, and it turned out that that UUID thingy was incorrect for me...
simply enter your partition in cleartext for root!

Example:
Replace
With

Thanks!
 

Your link worked great, I am unable to paste a URL because I'm new but thank you!

the arthour of that article is a student in iran ! and he is so much trouble, you can donate a few bucks to him as thank you

If you're getting this error, and you don't have the option of moving drives around (if you're on a laptop, for instance), try going into your bios and turning off AHCI on the SATA controller. It might be worded differently - disable anything about advanced controllers, enable anything referring to compatibility. YMMV, of course, but it worked for me.

Problem Solved for Dell Precision M4300 and kubuntu 7.04
 

Hi!

I was trying to install kubuntu on my dell laptop but I got the following error message:

BusyBox V1.1.3 (Debian 1:1.1.3 - 3Ubuntu2) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands
/bin/sh: can't access tty; job control turned off
(initramfs)

I used the solution found on https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/99757


The solution was using the F6 boot option and adding the string break=top
It looked than like:
.........quiet splash break=top
After you hit than the enter key the error message appears immediatel.
Type than
modprobe piix
exit

The LiveCD starts now. But It won´t start the graphical interface because the nvidia driver are not yet on the system.
You have to change now the driver to the vesa driver by changing the /etc/X11/xorg.conf with sudo vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf
You will find there the driver "nv" or "nvidia" change they to vesa.
After saving the file start the kde with startx

Greetings
Max

My son had the /bin/sh: can't access tty; job control turned off problem on a brand new laptop.

He fixed it by installing Mandriva.

I just got one of those new Dell laptops that comes with Ubuntu pre-installed. But like others in this thread, it won't boot the Ubuntu Live CD that came with the machine. I'm getting the same errors that everyone else is experiencing.

However, I did find a workaround. If you download the Ubuntu "alternate install" CD, it will boot. You can then install. The text-mode installer is not difficult to use.

If you want a Live CD, I've found that Kanotix will work fine with this machine.

The problem does appear to be with the Ubuntu Live CD not being compatible with certain hardware. I'm hoping that will be fixed in the next release, which is due out in less than a month, but we'll have to wait and see.

People: please file bug reports when you have problems like this. That's the only way that they'll get fixed. I have done that several times, and almost always got a rapid response from the developers.

best regards,
Oz

I want to add that I went ahead and filed a bug report just now, so the rest of you probably don't have to. I'll post again when I get a response from the developers.

Just thought i'd register to deliver my comments :)

I had the same problem and someone on another thread mentioned it is hardware incompatibility.

I tried using the text mode installer and when ubuntu tried to mount the dvd-rom i was installing from, it failed. This made me think that it is possibly the optical drive. I swapped it around for another one (I used pioneer at first and am now using LG) and it is installing perfectly.

Hope this helps :)

/bin/sh: can't access tty; job control turned off
I had this problem when installing 7.04 on a laptop with a SATA drive.
The (easy) solution is here http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=415009&page=14
See hbjason's post, Number 133

ONE MORE SOLUTION FOR THE SAME PROBLEM... it worked for me hope it does for u too...

when the ubuntu screen loads wit all the options like "start or install ubuntu","memtest", n few other options, exit the graphical mode by pressing "ESC" button... then enter the parameters..

boot:live noapic nolapic (then hit enter.. then the live cd loads normally..)

i am using kubuntu 7.04...

hiiii
while iam trying to istall ubuntu 6.10 in my new hp laptop iam getting an error like this.........

Busybox V1.1.3(debian 1:1.1.3-3ubuntu3) buit -in

Enter "Help' for a list of built-in-comands



/bin/sh: can't acess tty: job control tunned off

(initramfs)
i tried in google but i couldnt get a solution.......

There are several (different) solutions in this thread, did you try them?

I get this error when I have two SATA's and 2 PATA HDD's plugged in.
Just having Two SATAs work fine.
1 SATA and 1 PATA work fine too.
Motherboard: Asus PK5-VM
Core2duo CPU
Ubuntu 7.04

A work around is to press CTRL-ALT-F1 when Ubuntu is booting. For me it only seems to happen when the boot screen is showing, pressing Ctrl-Alt-F1 switches to a terminal till Ubuntu is finished booting up and this error doesn't occur.


I think this is a race condition with two cpus or more and having certain PATA drives.

Sorry folks. I don't want to diss anyone, but I'm really struggling with this one.

Even the meanest distro in the world has to turn its nose up at 64k!

What I would offer as serious advice to those who are trying to use Linux on older hardware is to work from the bottom up and give some of the lower-overhead distros a try first of all.

Feather Linux and Puppy Linux will work on incredibly low-spec machines. I'm a huge Puppy fan - even though it's not my main distro - and always install it on friends' older boxes if they've got limited hardware.

If you want a more polished desktop it might be worth trying Xubuntu, which is a basic version of ubuntu (using the Xfce desktop instead of Gnome or KDE) that runs in a lot less memory.

By the way, if the 64k mentioned above was a mistake and is really 64Mb I can be pretty certain that Puppy will run.

If you use a text-based installer CD Xubuntu will run in 128Mb.

Give Puppy a try first, though.

I'm facing th sam problm....Please help me....

My ssm configuation is Intel D 2.8 GHz, 160 GB SATA HDD, 512 MB DDR2 RAM

While installig Ubuntu after loaing t Kernel an screen appears as follows....

Busy Box v1.1.3 (Debian 1:1.1.3-3ubuntu3) Built in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

/bin/sh: can't access tty; job control turned off
(initramfs)[ 35.455613] ata1.00: failed to set xfermode (err_mak=0*4)
[ 70.879270] ata1.0: failed to set xfermode (err_mak=0*40)
[ 106.302912] ata1.0: failed to set xfermode (err_mak=0*40)


How can I solve this problem...Please Help me...hanx in advance...