Computer Crashed

hey guys, i hope you can help me here

I was cleaning my computer and accidently pulled the plug. Now it wont boot properly. Its running
RH8 by the way. Here is the error that it is showing up.


INIT: /etc/inittab[40]: id field too long (max 4 characters)

then there is a prompt like the following

Enter runlevel:

if i enter 0 it will go throught the shutdown process but if i enter 5, the following error occurs,
INIT: Entering runlevel: 5
INIT: Id "2" respawning too fast: disabled or 5 minutes
INIT: Id "4" respawning too fast: disabled or 5 minutes
INIT: Id "6" respawning too fast: disabled or 5 minutes

does anyone have any idea what happened here?

thanks in advance

I couldn't find too much on it...

This is just a guess ... but sounds like that file was corrupted.

I know that much of the time, it will automatically create a backup of that file when the file was changed.

See if there is the same file in the same direcory with a ~ appended to it.

If so, rename your current one, to something like inittab.old and rename the one with the ~ appended to it as inittab.

Do you still have this problem if you try to boot from a linux boot floppy?

You did backup, right?

From your post it sounded like you were trying to enter init:0, but init:0 is shutdown in Linux. If you enter this level it will ALWAYS shutdown, so you can do this all day but it will not boot. Also don't go into init:6 either. That's a reboot level....
Why not go into init:1 or init:3. It'll at least get you to a command prompt and you can dig around in it. You don't need a gui to fix things.....