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From: mpl@pegasus.ATT.COM (Michael P. Lindner)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.i386
Subject: Re: Esix console getty doesn't run.
Message-ID: <4952@pegasus.ATT.COM>
Date: 2 Aug 90 16:52:29 GMT
References: <1241@ixos.UUCP> <1090@ke4zv.UUCP> <222@rhum.tcom.stc.co.uk>
Reply-To: mpl@pegasus.ATT.COM (Michael P. Lindner)
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs NJ USA
Lines: 36

In article <222@rhum.tcom.stc.co.uk> pauld@tcom.stc.co.uk (Paul Davies) writes:
>In article <1090@ke4zv.UUCP> gary@ke4zv.UUCP (Gary Coffman) writes:
>>In article <1241@ixos.UUCP> mars@ixos.UUCP (mars) writes:
>>>Hello,
>>>
>>>I am running Esix Ref C. Everything ran fine, till i sold my VGA monitor
>>>and hooked up a Sony CPD1402E multisync. Esix started up, ran. The next
>>>day booting Esix didn't work any more. Init complained with
>>>co: command respawning too rapidly: getty  (or similar)
>>
>>Sounds like you didn't reinstall a serial cable properly. This is
>
>I had exactly the same problem on my 386 box running ESIX RevC.
	deleted
>Because it was a fairly new system with very little I needed to
>save  I just copied what I wanted onto the boot floppy (I don't have 
>any other backup device) reformatted and reinstalled from scratch.

I had the same symptom under AT&T UNIX on an AT&T machine here at work.
The power had been flakey, so I suspect it may have been filesystem
damage.  Anyway, as the past few days' work had not been backed up,
I was hesitant to reinstall UNIX.  What I did was boot from the boot
floppy, mount the hard disk, then copy all the unbacked-up files to
another floppy (I borrowed a floppy drive from another machine for
this).  I then reinstalled UNIX as an update, rather than a full
installation.  I had to modify the install script slightly to get it
to update itself - there is an "if" statement that checks the version
it is installing over - your mileage may vary.  Just to make sure,
I reinstalled all the add-ons as well, after the machine was up and
running.  It's still going fine today, so I guess things turned out OK.

I didn't find anyone here at AT&T who could guess what the problem was,
hoewever (ie. what file was corrupted/missing).

Mike Lindner
attmail!mplindner