Very Computer

In my new job, I have inherited a FreeBSD Box. To physically check out
some hardware I performed a Shutdown (can't remember the exact arguments
used now).

At restart, kernel processing appears to proceed without problems, until
the system somewhere during init, it apparently can't find getty. A
typical error report line looks like:
Jan 16 23:58:13 init: can't exec getty '/usr/libexec/getty' for port
/dev/ttyv0: No such file or directory
From this point, every 30 seconds the system constantly attempts to
execute getty.

And I can't get any response past this point. No keystrokes seem to do
anything, no tty devs of any kind seem to be in place. I can't RCMD from
another box anywhere.

I can reboot to a startup floppy (made with the boot.flp using fdimage),
but as the prblem seems to be a missing file (getty) I can;t get much
further.

I can get to the holographic tty4, but can't do much there either.

I can restart in single user mode, but that puts the system into
read-only mode and so I can't even see the /usr directory and files.

Any help appreciated......

        mount -u /
        mount /usr

(The -u flag means "update" the mount to the way it is listed in
fstab). Then you can check what file is missing. Presuming it is
getty that is missing, you should be able to get the missing file
from CD rom/backups.

If you have the CD rom mounted on another machine, you could do:

        cat /cdrom/bin/bin.?? | gunzip | tar xf - usr/bin/getty

to extract the original getty. Then stick it on a floppy and
copy it over.

        David.