Red Hat Gurus Save Me

[slinga]

I'm running a Red Hat 9.0 box as a Snort IDS for a security project at school. Sunday night I modified some of the Snort rules on the box, and rebooted via SSH. The box never came back up.

Going to the box yesterday I saw this error message (with the keyboard lights blinking like crazy):

Pivotroot: pivot_root/sysroot, /sysroot/initrd failed:2

unmount /initrd/ proc failed:2

Freeing Unused kernel Memory: 132k

Kernel Panic: No Init found

I have no idea what this error means, and I've been trying to google a solution for it.

I burned a Knoppix CD (for those that don't know, a cd bootable linux) and all the hardware looks\works fine. I can even mount the hard drive.

My question is, what do I have to do to get my machine to boot again? I was thinking about reinstalling Red Hat, but would I lose my data on the machine?

What about my startup scripts? I have about 2 gigs of IDS traffic logged that I cant' lose, I have to give a presentation tomorrow!!!

Edit: Question 2: I want to add another hard drive to this machine. I want to move the log data to the new drive, and to have it continually update. Is there an easy to do this? Say is it possible to mount /etc/snort/log to the new drive?

Thanks in advance.

P.S. - I'm a unix\linux\solaris\non-windows newb

 

[antime]

First hit on Google.

EDIT: Even if you can't get the RedHat installation working tonight, you can still use your Knoppix CD to transfer the logs somewhere else.

 

[slinga]

Thanks Antime,

As usual, you were right. :bow

It's booting fine, my presentation is done, and Snort is snorting again.

I'm having a little trouble with the spare hard drive I installed, but I can worry about that some other time. Thanks again.

 

[IBarracudaI]

lol, nice solution 😀 :lol:

 

[IceDigger]

haha nice