[PLUG] Help needed: notebook stuck in mid-reboot

[Rogan Creswick]

For future reference, the toshiba laptops I've worked with were _very_
difficult to TURN off. pressing the power switch invariably put them
to sleep (they can do this in hardware, I don't know what sleep stat
it is but it appears to keep the ram powered up while everything else
is quiet).

To turn them off I've had to hold the power button for some
innordinate length of time, longer than your typical 5-second ATX
thing, it seems.

Anyhow, this could explain the behavior you saw, and the solution you
came up with fits. The system won't post when you turn it back on
because it wasn't actually off.

-Rogan

On Fri, Apr 04, 2003 at 07:01:12AM -0800, Rich Shepard wrote:
>   I am learning more than I ever wanted to learn about the importance of
> files in /etc. I have really outdone myself this time and I don't know how
> to recover the system.
> 
>   When I went to reboot my Toshiba Portege last evening to re-install the OS
> (I inadvertently deleted all of /etc becuse I hit the [Enter] key before the
> ~ key) it stopped part-way through the process. Here's what the screen
> shows:
> 
> 	The system is going down for reboot NOW!
> 	INIT: Switching to runlevel: 6
> 	INIT: No inittab file found
> 	INIT: Sending processes the TERM signal
> 	INIT: Sending processes the KILL signal
> 	INIT: No more processes left in this runlevel
> 
> and there it stays. Keypresses produce only their ANSI codes on screen. When
> I power off, then power on again, the system doesn't do a POST, then look in
> the attached floppy drive for the boot floppy. It just restores the state it
> was in when shut down.
> 
>   I tried holding down the [Esc] key while powering on, but that made no
> difference. I was trying to get to setup so I could turn off the auto-start
> feature. Removing the pcmcia card attached to the cdrom drive produces a
> beep; reinserting the card produces another beep and the drive spins before
> again becoming comatose.
> 
>   I'm stuck in mud over the wheels on this and I need some expertise to pull
> me out.
> 
> TIA,
> 
> Rich
> 
> Dr. Richard B. Shepard, President
> 
>                        Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM)
>             2404 SW 22nd Street | Troutdale, OR 97060-1247 | U.S.A.
>  + 1 503-667-4517 (voice) | + 1 503-667-8863 (fax) | rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
>                          http://www.appl-ecosys.com/
> 
> 
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