Dumb Terminal

Keith

Keith

I left a little tiny " off of the ="YES in the rc.conf -- FreeBSD 8 now boots to a Dumb Terminal. As I know, commands to edit or iv do not work without a shell. How can I get a shell started or at least edit the rc.conf to add the final " ?
 
It should ask you the path to your shell, and then I think you should be able to mount -a to get to the point where you can edit your rc.conf.
 
Can you boot in single user mode at startup? Or drop to shell?

If all else fails boot with a live cd and fix it.

The file is at
/etc/rc.conf

I don't see rc.conf keeping you from booting. You sure you did not change something else?
 
I tried different ways... in the end, I used a different HD that also contained freebsd and then mounted my original hd, then edited the file needing the repair. It worked nicely.
 
Choose option 4 (Boot to single-user mode) from the boot menu.

That will mount the / filesystem read-only, and drop you to a shell. From there, you can remount the filesystem as read-write (mount -u /), and finally edit the file.

Then, to continue the boot into multi-user mode, just type "exit" or hit CTRL+D at the shell prompt.
 
Thank you for your response. I'm using an IOMEGA server with USB ports and the keyboard won't initialize until after the boot menu. So, I can't choose to launch in single-user mode, nor any other mode. I'm thinking that I would have to build a custom kernal to be able to make it start up in a mode other that default. That was why I option to plug in another drive and boot from it, then mount the faulty drive on a usb port.
 
Go through the BIOS to see if there are any options for "Legacy Keyboard Support" or "USB Keyboard" or similar. This will enable PS/2 emulation for a USB keyboard.
 
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