On Sun, 31 May 1998 13:44:55 +0000,
"m. d. walker" <mwalker@en.com> wrote:
> For the past few weeks my system has been running smoothly. I have been
> playing with various commands, but mostly with vi. Vi hung on me once and I
> was forced to reboot the Mac via the power key. Ever since, I have been
> getting this weird message on booting into multi-user mode:
> 
> init: can't exec getty '/usr/lebexec/getty' for port /dev/ttye0: no such
> file or directory
> 
> Then nothing. This message repeats every so often, and I have to manually
> reboot the Mac to get out of this cycle.
> 
> I then boot into single user mode to check out this error.  I snoop the
> getty file with "more getty" and it responds "Floating point exception."
> This doesn't sound good to me. (My original purpose was to follow the
> recommendations on the FAQ 10.14.)

Actually, I think you somehow lost the device file /dev/ttye0.  What
if you go to /dev and do "./MAKEDEV ttye0"?

> Deciding to ignore this error I decide to try and get back into multi-user
> mode by using 'exit' which runs through its list of checks and then I get a:
> 
> panic: ffs_valloc: dup alloc
> stopped at _Debugger +0x6: unlk ag
> 
> db>
> 
> >From there I enter 'reboot' and check the past messages digests.
> 
> Again I boot into single user mode and do a fsck -f and respond 'y' to all
> queries.

Some important files may have been lost or damaged at this point.  A
reinstallation might help.

> Now, upon entering single user mode, (multi-user just goes into this
> endless cycle) certain commands respond with "Floating point exception."
> (i.e., man, vi, sed and a few others.)

Is the error reproducible?  I mean, can you isolate an exact step
that causes the error everytime you do that?

Ken