inittab missing, what do I do?

[Tony Hammitt]

Get a bootable CD, back up your user files to somewhere like the windows
partition, then reinstall Linux.  This is the easiest thing to do.

Then go out and get a battery backup.  They're only $100 or so and until
Linux comes with a journalling filesystem as standard equipment, all
users should have a battery backup.  The time savings alone will pay for
it in the short run.  All users should also insist on error correcting
memory, too.  Heck, even windows will run better with ECC memory.

If anyone wants to post an actual fix for this system, that'd probably
be more welcome than my standard 'get a battery backup' rant...

Regards,

Tony

CRRoot at dstsystems.com wrote:
> 
> OK gurus, here's the situation.  I had my dual boot PC running under Linux
> the other night, when my wife called me away to do something.  I locked the
> machine and walked away, expecting to be gone momentarily.  Well, I never
> got back to it that night and by the time I got home last night, the power
> had been knocked out due to the storm.
> 
> Now, we all know that improperly exiting Linux is a Bad Thing.  But I'd had
> this happen before and thought I knew what to do.  When it could not
> successfully boot up and prompted me for the root password, I signed on and
> entered
> 
> fsck /dev/hda5
> 
> and answered "y" to all the questions.   Then I rebooted, and it seemed to
> be setting up okay until it displayed a line to the effect that "inittab is
> missing.  Select a runlevel".    No matter what  runlevel I choose, it
> tells me that "There are no more processes running at that level".
> 
> My questions are:   What do I do to fix this?  and What should I have done
> in the first place to avoid this?
> 
> Obviously I could have shut all the way down the other night, but after
> hearing so much about the legendary stability of Linux I thought it would
> be alright for a day.
> 
> Any help would be appreciated.  Thank you.
> Cory
>