Hi, How do I overcome an issue with solaris box 2.6 not booting and complaining cant edit utmpx file. I tried to touch this file and edited vfstab. my /var is within the / filesystem. Even though I have veritas installed boot disk is not under its control. All happened when I accidently tried to copy another box's /etc to this box as a back up... Alass.. Pls help me with your valuable inputs....

what does the machine do when u power-on?? do u get the ok prompt?does it try booting to the diff run levels? can't u boot into single user mode? power on the machine, bring it to the ok prompt(stop-A or SHIFT~. if on a remote console or whatever way u cn halt the sstem) and type in boot -s at the ok prompt.. does that work?? then try rectifying the damage...

Oh!! I tried booting in different levels from ok prompt,, but whatever I do it comes to a stage while booting and says can't edit utmpx. At this stage I cant do anything but reseting and try the same. I can see all the files when I boot thru the O/S cd and mount the boot disk onto /a. This way I have a chance to edit the /etc files. But can I copy all the /etc files after booting from cd to my actual /etc?? I know I may have to edit lots of files is not it?? What about rc files?? Are they same in both places? Thank You,

try booting to single user mode via the cdrom, and doing fsck -F ufs -y /dev/rdsk/cXd0tXsX where the cXtXd0sX is the partition on the disk where / (and /var) is. then reboot

Did try..but no luck :-(

do u have yr /var/adm/utmpx|wtmpx files? these error messages are pretty harmless during a reboot..but I have not had a machine not come up because of these.. try posting on Sun managers list[posting guidelines in the faq]: http://www.latech.edu/sunmanfaq.html or comp.unix.solaris best of luck!

Sounds like a hosed /etc/vfstab file. The reason its complaining about not being able to write to the utmpx file is somehow the /root directory didn't mount correctly and your stuck in single-user mode with no write privs. A df -k will show you what I mean at the single-user mode prompt. The way around this is to boot off the CD end edit the /etc/vfstab file from there.