Holy Moly - Zaurus Cannot Find Half Of My Programs

[klatt]

My zaurus was rock solid. a 3200 with fluxbox and kopi. rock solid. suspend worked every time.  

I installed SCITE from one of the feeds (I only had official and contrib feeds) and then soon "rm" "find" "touch" "chgrp" "dmesg" etc was not found!!

I rebooted (Big Mistake) and now I can't even get to a prompt.

I get tons of errors, a bunch in /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit about different commands being not found.

Then tons of:

INIT: cannot execute "/sbin/getty"



Then the last two are:

INIT: Id "ln" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: no more processes left in this runlevel


then the all the INIT errors repeat again ...


HOLY CRAP DOES ANYONE HAVE A CLUE WHAT HAPPENED BECAUSE I AM CLUELESS.

THANKS SO MUCH!
Frank

[InSearchOf]

My zaurus was rock solid. a 3200 with fluxbox and kopi. rock solid. suspend worked every time. 

I installed SCITE from one of the feeds (I only had official and contrib feeds) and then soon "rm" "find" "touch" "chgrp" "dmesg" etc was not found!!

I rebooted (Big Mistake) and now I can't even get to a prompt.

I get tons of errors, a bunch in /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit about different commands being not found.

Then tons of:

INIT: cannot execute "/sbin/getty"



Then the last two are:

INIT: Id "ln" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: no more processes left in this runlevel


then the all the INIT errors repeat again ...


HOLY CRAP DOES ANYONE HAVE A CLUE WHAT HAPPENED BECAUSE I AM CLUELESS.

THANKS SO MUCH!
Frank
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What release are you running?

Late

[klatt]

Ack, Beta3. Sorry I can't believe I forgot that!

[karlto]

I installed SCITE from one of the feeds (I only had official and contrib feeds) and then soon "rm" "find" "touch" "chgrp" "dmesg" etc was not found!!

...

INIT: cannot execute "/sbin/getty"

All of those programs including getty are handled by busybox (you *should* see them as symlinks to /bin/busybox).

If you can get into a rescue mode prompt somehow, I guess you'd start by checking whether either busybox is missing or the symlinks are gone and replacing these. It seems really strange that installing a package would do that sort of damage though! Hopefully you don't have many files missing!

Good luck

[klatt]

I installed SCITE from one of the feeds (I only had official and contrib feeds) and then soon "rm" "find" "touch" "chgrp" "dmesg" etc was not found!!

...

INIT: cannot execute "/sbin/getty"

All of those programs including getty are handled by busybox (you *should* see them as symlinks to /bin/busybox).

If you can get into a rescue mode prompt somehow, I guess you'd start by checking whether either busybox is missing or the symlinks are gone and replacing these. It seems really strange that installing a package would do that sort of damage though! Hopefully you don't have many files missing!

Good luck
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Oh Crap!  I did remove busybox I think by accident when trying to remove the other *box stuff since I'm running fluxbox.  Crap.  Any suggestions on how to get it back on there?

Can I run ipkg from the recovery console?

Thanks,
Frank

[zi99y]

When you boot up does it initialise your lan/wireless and sshd, on bootup on my 3200 the CF wireless card light comes on half way through boot, and if you have a hang after that you could connect remotely with ssh from another machine and then reinstall the package.

Alternatively, is there any way to mount the root filesystem from the recovery shell? I've never tried but if you can then you would need to extract the files from the busybox ipk and place them in the root retaining the folder structure in  the ipk.

I'm surprised that a critical package such as busybox is un-installable, looks like we need to be careful there.

Another way - if you have no precious files in the root filesystem - is to reinstall without reformatting the microdrive, as long as the original partition layout is intact you should be able to reinstall without wiping it. Not sure what happens if you have a /home partition on the flash memory though.

Hope you get it fixed

[zmiq2]

Hi,

maybe you could
 - take the cf/sd card out of the zaurus
 - plug it in a linux box
 - copy the original zaurus busybox executable for your distro to the card
 - insert the card in the zaurus
 - run busybox from the card to copy itself to where it should be
 - redo the links for other linux commands

HTH

[daniel3000]

Hi,

he doesn't even get to a prompt because getty is not there.

It should work this way:
Boot into the rescue Linux system using D+B boot (Remove AC and battery, hold D+B keys down while inserting the battery and switching battery switch to "on" position). This should boot into an intact rescue linux.

From there you can mount the actual root:

mount -t jffs /dev/mtdblock2 /mnt

Then copy the attached busybox binary (unzip first!) from a CF or SD card to /mnt/bin

The links with names "getty", "mount" etc. should still exist, as only their target has been deleted.

Reboot.

Good luck!

daniel

[zi99y]

mount -t jffs /dev/mtdblock2 /mnt
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Slightly different...

mkdir /mnt/temp
mount -t jffs2 /dev/mtdblock2 /mnt/temp

there may already be mounted filesystems in /mnt so best to make a new mount point first - my SD card automounted in the recovery console. Also fs type should read jffs2

works a treat!

[klatt]

Thanks so much everyone! especially daniel3000!  I am back in business!!

Thanks a lot!