Hi,

Today, on one of my SCO machines, i was getting the following:

PANIC : exit cannot exec /etc/init (PID1).

I used two floppy boot/root disks to boot from floppy.
I followed the procedures to restore the files:

/usr/lib/libc.so.1 and /etc/init.

When I reached the part of making sure that both above files are owned and executable by bin, I wanted to use the "chown" command, but this command was not found (not foun error).

So then i proceded without the chown step, umnounted the hard disk, reboot, but this time instead of getting a panic error, i am getting a warning instead:

WARNING - exit init (PID1) died.


Any help would be appreciated, meanwhile i will try to insert the /bin/chown in the floppy root disk to :

cp /mnt/bin/chown . (of course doing that after cd /mnt/bin), maybe this is the step that is still missing.

Thanks.

Suggest a search on A.P. Lawrence.com for "exit cannot exec /etc/init".

That is where you will find this:
and other info relating to your problem.

I appreciate your reply.
I already tried this solution and after applying it, i started receiving a init died message instead of the cannot exce init.

I think my problem is bigger than that, /bin has only one component: the posix directory....it is empty man.

Unless you have a good backup then it looks like a rebuild.

I assume that you have mounted your root filesystem on another box or something so that you can examine it?

I have access to a SCO box. uname -a says:
SCO_SV scobox 3.2 2 i386

/bin is nothing but a bunch of symbolic links.
For example:
sh -> /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.2Dp/bin/sh

That directory is the most common one in my symlinks, but there are others.

So my guess is that someone removed all of your symbolic links. That would take something like
find / -type l -exec rm "{}"
run as root.

Removing a symbolic link or anything else will update the inode change time on the directory which contained it. If you have not touched /bin yet:
ls -lcd /bin
will tell you when that happened. sulog and/or wtmp may give an idea as to who did it. Unless everyone just logs on as root.

Thanks for your reply.

But I did not get exactly your solution
I think you mentioned what might have happened, but not what i should do to get the machine again up.

Thanks.

I would reload the os, rebuild my file systems, and read in my last backup tape. That will be much easier than trying to undo a disaster like that.