When booting up and there is a failure to mount a filesystem, Redhat prompts for root password or ctrl-d for normal startup. At this point no matter what is entered it is considered a failed password attempt. Even ctrl-d will not work. Pressing ctrl-c a couple of times will break out and drop to a shell prompt.
My guess would be that the filesystem that is having trouble getting mounted has /etc on it, therefore no password is going to be accepted. There is really nothing that can be done about this short of booting from a rescue disk and trying to repair the filesystem. Reopen this bug if the filesystem which is having the problems is not the root filesystem.
/ was mounted read-only and /etc/passwd (and shadow) were accessible when this occurred. The mount failure was on another filesystem.
Are you using a particular keymap?
Guys, this is broken on every single Sparc install. I detailed this to Jeff slightly over a month ago. The net result is that any key typed in during this phase of the boot will send incorrect keycodes to the kernel. This is with a default installation, it happens every time. My guess is that the loading of keymaps which happens very very early on in the boot process, is what corrupts the keyboard codes. As an experiment to try and figure out whats wrong and fix this, just change the root filesystem fsck with some other application program, such as a shell, for testing purposes. My prediction is that you'll see the same behavior because of something funny done by the boot time loadkeys.
Hmm. I can't reproduce this here on two different sparcs running 6.0 - the keyboard is fine both before and after the loadkeys. Out of curiousity, does /etc/sysconfig/console/default.kmap look anything like a sun keymap, or does it look totally bogus?
closed, lack of input.