[CentOS] Any alternative to Single User Mode

Mon Jun 15 01:47:08 UTC 2015
jd1008 <jd1008 at gmail.com>


On 06/14/2015 07:36 PM, Animesh Pandey wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 9:06 PM, jd1008 <jd1008 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> On 06/14/2015 06:47 PM, Animesh Pandey wrote:
>>
>>> I actually opened the Virtual Disk Image (.vdi) on http://www.vmxray.com/
>>> .
>>> I could see that despite my disk being of 100GB only ~65GB was being
>>> shown.
>>> All the stuff related ot the local user was not visible at all.
>>> After I restarted my VM, the OS gets stuck here (
>>> http://i.stack.imgur.com/KVYxV.png). Even after trying the single user
>>> login it was stuck there. But the emergency mode worked alright.
>>>
>>> On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 8:37 PM, jd1008 <jd1008 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> On 06/14/2015 06:28 PM, Animesh Pandey wrote:
>>>>
>>>>   Hi,
>>>>> I am working on Centos6.6 on a VirtualBox on Windows Host. Today I
>>>>> started
>>>>> to have booting issues in the OS. It won't get past the loading screen.
>>>>> I
>>>>> checked and found that the files related to the user "cloudera" on the
>>>>> system were not accessible. Only the files related to root were
>>>>> accessible.
>>>>> This is why I was am not able to do a single user login but an emergency
>>>>> login was possible. This is just a guess.
>>>>> This all happened due to some update in the Virtual Machine that I use
>>>>> to
>>>>> run CentOS.
>>>>>
>>>>> Is there any workaround for this issue?
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks and regards,
>>>>> Animesh Pandey
>>>>>
>>>>>   I wish you could provide more info.
>>>> How can you determine that inaccessibility to a user's
>>>> files will prevent centos from taking you all the way to
>>>> the login (or welcome) screen?
>>>>
>>>> I think something else is going on and my guess is that
>>>> the centos files themselves have been corruped.
>>>> Can you re-install centos ?
>>>>
>>> Please do not top-post.
>> I am having trouble following your terminology.
>> Emergency model?
>> On my centos installation, there is no "Emergency ...."
>> to select from the list of kernels to boot.
>>
>> Also, when you say "worked alright" do you
>> mean that you were able to access what you thought
>> was missing?
>> Can you go to full multiuser?
>>
>>
>>
> Sorry for top posting.
>
> Let me give you a clearer idea.
>
> 1. My regular boot freezes after loading is completed.
> 2. I read on the internet that sometimes due to an update in VirtualBox,
> this error might occur. To rectify it, I must re-install VirtualBox's Guest
> Additions. For this, I require booting in a Single User Mode.
> 3. For that, I followed the correct steps as given here (
> https://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/Installation_Guide-en-US/s1-rescuemode-booting-single.html).
> But still the system froze on that same point.
> 4. Then I read about an Emergency mode which is even lower level to that of
> Single User mode. I was able to log in and see the files that I
> created/modified as root. I could not see any file/folder that related the
> local user "cloudera" on which I used to work. This is where I thought of
> seeing the contents of the Image using vmxray.com and found that a large
> part of the dick is not visible. This part contains that files related to
> "cloudera". I felt as if any information related to "cloudera" user has
> been lost.
>
> I basically need to access files that I made as "cloudera" on CENTOS and if
> possible re-install the Guest Additions that ma solve this issue. But for
> this I need to be able to boot as a Single User.
I assume you are using a virtual drive, which is a file on the host
machine (You said windows??? ).
If you can somehow use a tool to dump that disk image to
a real hard drive (for example using dd ), and connect
the hard drive a a working linux computer to run fsck on it
to see what it will find.
I assume you have no backup of your drive???