[ale] howto force "give root password" prompt

[wolf at wolfhalton.info]

If it was a regular install, you could use a livedisk and poke around in
the fstab boot.lst and so on.
You could also see if you could single-user start-up from the boot menu,
but I am not sure if you are even getting as far as a boot menu
VMs have lots of eccentricities as compared to regular installs.  

Can you look at the vm hard drive through your main filesystem?  It may
be just a set of large files in one of the (possibly hidden) vmware
folders (or virtualbox folders or whatever).

If it is not loaded with files or some-such precious things, just blow
it out and make a new one.  This is how my friends who manage data
centers seem to handle it.  Apparently VMWare server will do all of this
automagically.  I don't know how exactly they set their systems to do
that.  

-Wolf

-----Original Message-----
From: John G. Heim <jheim at math.wisc.edu>
Reply-to: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts - Yes! We run Linux! <ale at ale.org>
To: ale at ale.org
Subject: [ale] howto force "give root password" prompt
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2009 11:46:03 -0600


I have a problem with a vmware virtual machine. It's running debian/lenny. 
After a power failure, it tends to not boot. It ssits at a prompt saying, 
"Give root password for maintenance (or type control-D for normal startup."

I need to be able to get past this prompt if I'm not in the physical 
presence  of the machine. I can log into the vmware server and hard boot it. 
But it comes up the same way. There is a vmware command for answering 
console questions. But I don't know if it will work. Other than pulling the 
plug, how can I test it? I want to somehow make it come up with that prompt 
to see if the vmware answer command will let me get past it.


So this is not really a vmware question. It's just a linux question. What 
causes a linux machine to come up asking if you want to enter maintenance 
mode and can I artificially reproduce those conditions?

_______________________________________________
Ale mailing list
Ale at ale.org
http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20091217/96f8d837/attachment.html