[ale] howto force "give root password" prompt

[jim.kinney at gmail.com (Jim Kinney)]

Chris nailed it. This is caused by fsck needing to run. You can disable fsck
checking on boot up with the fstab setting (the last 2 numbers in the line
get changed to 0 0).

Since you have a vmware system, it may be prudent to have a known clean copy
of the properly shutdown OS that can be used to overwrite the broken one
during a failed boot. That will, of course require all data writes to be
onto an external, non-vmware storage system.

On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 12:46 PM, John G. Heim <jheim at math.wisc.edu> wrote:

> I have a problem with a vmware virtual machine. It's running debian/lenny.
> After a power failure, it tends to not boot. It ssits at a prompt saying,
> "Give root password for maintenance (or type control-D for normal startup."
>
> I need to be able to get past this prompt if I'm not in the physical
> presence  of the machine. I can log into the vmware server and hard boot
> it.
> But it comes up the same way. There is a vmware command for answering
> console questions. But I don't know if it will work. Other than pulling the
> plug, how can I test it? I want to somehow make it come up with that prompt
> to see if the vmware answer command will let me get past it.
>
>
> So this is not really a vmware question. It's just a linux question. What
> causes a linux machine to come up asking if you want to enter maintenance
> mode and can I artificially reproduce those conditions?
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>



-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
Actively in pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20091210/1cc388e5/attachment.html