How do you get a 6000 to boot the equivalent of single user?

[Dan &]

In article <10600 at batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> schinder at batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Paul Schinder) writes:

Paul> [While I'm waiting for a phone call from IBM, I thought I might
Paul> try here]

Paul> We have a PowerStation 320, running AIX 3.1, which started acting up
Paul> last night by refusing to boot, and the console remains dark with no
Paul> information.  The initial reboot was done by a "shutdown -r"; when I
Paul> realized later that the machine hadn't rebooted, I found it showing a
Paul> three digit code "c99".  After several attempts to boot it, I loaded
Paul> standalone diagnostics from the floppies.  The hardware all checked
Paul> out.  Now when we try to boot it, the code is "553", which according
Paul> to a previous phone call from IBM means the inittab file is bad.
Paul> (Neither "c99" or "553" is in any of the documentation we have).

Paul> We have AIX on tape, but unfortunately our tape drive hasn't arrived
Paul> yet.  We don't have AIX floppies.  So there seems to be no other way
Paul> for us to boot AIX except from the preinstalled version on the hard
Paul> disk.  The man pages I've read seem to indicate that if booted in
Paul> maintainence mode, the inittab is ignored, but they don't say how
Paul> to boot in maintainence mode.

Paul> So *is* there an equivalent of single user mode on these machines?
Paul> How do you get it to come up that way?  And why is the console off so
Paul> far into the boot; how can you tell how the boot in going if the
Paul> console doesn't display any messages?

Did you get an answer from IBM?  I asked my SE the same question and did not
really get an answer.  

Do you have the installation floppies?  I vaguely remember something like
the following: You boot up the floppies as if you were going to install from
tape.  When you get to the first menu you drop into a shell.  Then run
/etc/continue.  It is not quite 'single user' in the real UNIX sense.  I
think that you are still running out of the memory resident version of the /
file system at this point.  Not sure if you can mount your file systems,
etc.



--
Dan Ehrlich <ehrlich at cs.psu.edu>/Voice: +1 814 863 1142/FAX: +1 814 865 3176