[wellylug] Boot error "INIT: Id "1" respawning too fast:"

[Phillip Rose]

Hello,

I'm running RH9 (2.4.20-8) on an AMD 2400XP with 1GB RAM. I have not
upgraded the kernel from the original installation. My system will no
longer boot normally.

A few days ago I freshened some RPMs including gdm-2.4.1.3-5.1.i386.rpm and
the latest cdrecord. I tried blanking a CD-RW disk in a terminal window in
X (this always worked fine before), and cdrecord hung on me, and I was
unable to kill the process. I then tried logging out. The system wouldn't
shut down normally, so I pressed the reset button.

Now I am unable to boot my system, not even using the rescue boot diskette
and typing "Linux 1". This is from a normal boot:
(...)
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem).
Red Hat nash version 3.4.42 starting
Loading jbd.o module
Journalled Block Device driver loaded
Loading ext3.0 module
Mounting /proc filesystem
Creating block devices
Creating root device
Mounting root filesystem
kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds
EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
Freeing unused kernel memory: 128 freed
INIT: version 2.84 booting
INIT: Entering runlevel: 5
INIT: Id "1" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: Id "2" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: Id "3" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: Id "4" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: Id "5" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: Id "6" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: Id "x" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: no more processes left in this runlevel
  (Then after 5 minutes:)
INIT: Id "4" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: Id "1" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: Id "x" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

When I press CTRL+ALT+DEL I see:
shutdown: warning: cannot open /var/run/shutdown.pid

I googled the problem, and there were suggestions about inittab, but most
of the suggestions seemed to point at problems that didn't seem to relate.
I booted from a Linux install CDROM using "linux rescue" mode. I looked for
recent modifications to init, inittab, mingetty and some other files but
saw no evidence of that. When I tried
"chroot /mnt/sysimage" (as suggested by the linux rescue documentation) I
got a seg fault message.

The last entry in /var/log/messages were abort messages for scsi host 0.
This would have been from my problem with cdrecord. The last entry from
/var/log/dmesg is:
scsi0: SCSI host adapter emulation for IDE ATAPI drives.
Type: Pioneer (etc)

It seemed to stop at the DVD RW drive. Any suggestions are welcome!

--Phillip Rose