Re: unable to open initial console

[Jonathan Dill <dill@umbi.umd.edu>]

For the record, here is the fix that I used:

1. make gnutar of /dev from RH 7.1 system without devfs and with correct
entries

2. copy tar to affected system

3. boot off the CD or boot.img floppy disk with "linux rescue"

4. untar the dev tar in the root tree

5. exit and reboot

6. for good measure "rpm -i --force" the dev rpm

When I booted off the CD, sure enough, I found that /dev was essentially
empty.  I don't think just mknod for the /dev/console will work because
you're also going to need the /dev/sdXX or /dev/hdXX entries so that
mounting filesystems will work.  It might be possible to write a short
script to create just the necessary dev inodes to get the system back
up, but I don't care enough about it to spend time on it.

Another approach would be to "rpm -i --force" the dev rpm from the
rescue console chrooted to the root partition.  I don't think using
relocate is a good idea because there may be symbolic links in /dev that
get broken.

-- 
"Jonathan F. Dill" (dill@umbi.umd.edu)
CARB Systems and Network Administrator
Home Page:  http://www.umbi.umd.edu/~dill