> In article <623u3m$5lj$1@palladium.transmeta.com>,
> H. Peter Anvin <hpa@transmeta.com> wrote:
> >Oh, distribution maintainers: at least one widely used Linux
> >distribution fscks and mounts all filesystems read-write before
> >entering single-user mode. This is *VERY* dangerous and broken
> >behaviour -- single-user mode is by definition a recovery mode to be
> >entered when something breaks, and assuming all filesystems are
> >available and safe to mount read-write is just plain broken. In
> >single-user mode, initlevel 1, only / should be mounted, read-only.
>
> You're talking about Debian, I suppose? Yes it does that, but it's
> very reasonable IMHO and other Unixes do it too. If you really want
> to boot into a mode where you just get a shell, there's always the
> `emergency' (or -b, as in SunOS) boot flag that will immediately
> give you a shell without doing mounting/fsck'ing first.
>
> This is all documented in the init manual page.
In any case, if mounting everything doesn't work, a Debian box will
happily come up with / mounted ro and asking for the root password for a
single user login (and telling people just what arguments to give mount to
remount / rw). So, it's not assuming everything works before allowing you
to start recovering. Happened to me several times, and should be
sufficient.
MfG Kai