I’ve been playing with remote debugging (via firewire) over the last few weeks, and a few days ago I uncommented a line from /etc/ttys that allowed me to login from the remote debugger. Didn’t think too much of it until I got home and started my desktop. It ran through the boot sequence then just stopped. No real information, just no action! I rebooted and used the ‘-v’ option to get more information. One extra line that wasn’t much help.

As I’d been using the remote debugger I decided to try booting with the laptop switched on. Sure enough there’s the problem! fsck had detected a problem, but the primary console didn’t get the output, it was routed to the remote debugger console! Chose a shell, ran fsck manually and all was well again. Not sure why the error messages didn’t appear on the primary console, but it’s something I need to fix to avoid any repetitions.