vt1 through vt6 went missing, no getty anywhere

[aRTee]

As the description and title say: I don't get any vt's anymore. I didn't change anything about my inittab, it looks like this:

 

#
# inittab	   This file describes how the INIT process should set up
#			   the system in a certain run-level.
#
# Author:	   Miquel van Smoorenburg, <miquels@drinkel.nl.mugnet.org>
#			   Modified for RHS Linux by Marc Ewing and Donnie Barnes
#

# Default runlevel. The runlevels used by Mandriva Linux are:
#   0 - halt (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
#   1 - Single user mode
#   2 - Multiuser, without NFS (The same as 3, if you do not have networking)
#   3 - Full multiuser mode
#   4 - unused
#   5 - X11
#   6 - reboot (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
#
id:5:initdefault:

# System initialization.
si::sysinit:/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit

l0:0:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 0
l1:1:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 1
l2:2:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 2
l3:3:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 3
l4:4:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 4
l5:5:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 5
l6:6:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 6

# Trap CTRL-ALT-DELETE
ca::ctrlaltdel:/sbin/shutdown -t3 -r now

# When our UPS tells us power has failed, assume we have a few minutes
# of power left.  Schedule a shutdown for 2 minutes from now.
# This does, of course, assume you have powerd installed and your
# UPS connected and working correctly.
pf::powerfail:/sbin/shutdown -f -h +2 "Power Failure; System Shutting Down"

# If power was restored before the shutdown kicked in, cancel it.
pr:12345:powerokwait:/sbin/shutdown -c "Power Restored; Shutdown Cancelled"


# Run gettys in standard runlevels
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1
2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty2
3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty3
4:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty4
5:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty5
6:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty6

# Single user mode
~~:S:wait:/bin/sh

 

Is there anything wrong with this, I mean, in the sense that it got changed while I wasn't looking and vt1 to 6 are turned off? It does say tty1 ... tty6 should respawn...

 

Ok, resolved.

 

I put something in /etc/rc.local without adding the ampersand & so that that process didn't finish.

 

I didn't realise that that would mean that inittab wouldn't go on with the rest.

 

I just killed the process /etc/rc5.d//S99local and my gettys showed up.

[scarecrow]

Is it safe to presume that you just had a dodgy initscripts update?

Actually I also had this very same problem under my current OS (Arch Linux) some twenty months ago. The solution was booting at runlevel one, and re-installing initscripts (from the package cache, as there is no network at runlevel one).

I won't sware your case is identical, but it does sound familiar to me...