respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

[phishbreath]

Excuse my being a newbian and all, but I’ve come across this little dilemma. I’ve recently installed fedora core 3 and all went well. It’s on a new hdd set up to boot with xp’s ntloader. All worked fine. Then I tried to update fedora using the handy little up2date button.

I let it run overnight, as it checked dependencies. It confirmed that I did not want to download the new kernel. Warned that one of the updates required the new kernel so I chose not to install that one either.

It started to download all the rpm’s without a hitch, till it got to cups. It warned that the rpm wasn’t signed, continue yes or no? I chose yes.

When it got to actually installing all the rpms, it hung on the cups one. I let it just hang there for half an hour before hard booting it. Now it won’t boot at all. Gets to the point where the graphical boot loader should display, but instead reads “INIT: Id "1" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes”

I’m not too far into it that I can’t just start over, but I’d rather not. Any ideas?

[vishnumrao]

I too had the same problem when I was updating to a newer kernel. I tried many many things and also sought the help of some very experienced linux friends. Nothing worked. and reinstalled FC3. If you dont have much data in your machine reinstall.


I would say update to a newer kernel but also keep the older one just in case the newer one goes bust then you can boot into the older one and remove the newer one. Then again update to the newer one.

Cheers,
Vishnu Murahari Rao.

[phishbreath]

I guess its a re-install then. i'd like to get the updates but is there a more stable way then up2date? or is it best to do the updates in small groups of RPMs instead of the whole lot at once?

[mugs]

Sounds to me like you need to reinstall your video drivers. I have gotten the same message after upgrading to or booting into a new kernel. I had to reinstall the NVIDIA drivers, of course it depends on what video card you have. So, you could reinstall the video drivers, or temporarily modify your xorg.conf to let you get into X. Let us know what your video card setup is.

[AndyGreen]

“INIT: Id "1" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes”

You're sure it does not say, "X is respawning too fast"? Mugs' ideas sound good except for this discrepancy.

If it really is init that is respawning, that's a whole other kettle of fish.

[mugs]

Sorry, I guess I just assumed it was X.

[phishbreath]

Well i re-installed last night. As for the video card, its an ATI Radeon 9600 pro. i hadn't changed the driver at all.

After re-installing everything last night, i loaded the ATI proprietary drivers for the vid card. other then the ati installer breaking gnome's ability to change screen resolution, everything seems to be fine now.

Although i'm a little hesitant to use the up2date function again.

[AndyGreen]

It sounds like Mugs' ideas were right. If you do update your kernel you'll meet the same situation, and a reinstall is not the best medicine; you only need to recompile your ATI driver to match your new kernel. Someone else can take you through that when you're ready, since I do not have any ATI video drivers here.

[phishbreath]

but the thing is, i never installed a new kernel, for fears of something like this happening. i was just doing the regular updates, and it crashed while installing the cups rpm (printing related i think).

Is it common for an up2date crash to wipe the entire OS?

[AndyGreen]

Normally the ext3 filesystem will take care of filesystem-level corruption. But interrupting (albeit not your fault) any OS that is doing an install or upgrade is likely to cause trouble.

Fedora is very recoverable in discrete stages of increasing hassle, ending with a recovery CD boot. If we did more work to investigate where it was blowing up and why we could have likely done something about it before it became on OS Reinstall job -- that was really your decision not the crash's.

[phishbreath]

true, it was my decision but i wasn't too far in for it to be a big concern. i'm starting to think that i should have taken more time on this one in case it happens at a later date when a re-install becomes a big concern.

There should be some form of replacement therapy to give up winblows. thanks all for the quick replies

[mrmachine]

A friend of mine has just experienced an almost identical situation - he was using up2date, and the computer crashed, and upon his reboot got the message:

“INIT: Id "X" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes”

I seem to remember getting this problem myself, and having to delete an Xsession file, or something like that ... does anyone know the solution?

[AndyGreen]

Have a look in his /var/log/Xorg.0.log and see what it is complaining about.

[fsck]

Originally Posted by phishbreath

but the thing is, i never installed a new kernel, for fears of something like this happening. i was just doing the regular updates, and it crashed while installing the cups rpm (printing related i think).

Is it common for an up2date crash to wipe the entire OS?

up2date didn't "wipe the entire OS". If you kill an update which has only partially completed, you are likely to leave the system with all sorts of library and binary mismatches which can, in extremis, cause the machine not to boot. Sounds to me like this is what happened.
The message you recieved simply states that the entry in inittab with id "1", ie this:

1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1

was respawning too fast, probably because mingetty (the terminal control program, provides the "login" prompt) was bombing out because of the above mentioned mismatches.
It may have been possible to recover by booting to single-user, bringing up the network manually and doing a 'yum update'. Then again it may not.

C.

[jimmythak]

Hi,
I'm the mate that mrmachine was talking about above...I have attached the file, could you have a lok at it for me?....i'm new to linux...and its still all a little confusing.

Thanks