When this happened to me it was because I 'trashed my console' when
I rebooted from X (xdm). This is how I fixed it:
o booted with one of my install disks
o mounted the drive
o renamed basically all of my /etc/rc.d/ files so they wouldn't be
run
o booted the system, logged in
o typed:
# cd /dev
# rm console
# mknod -m 0622 console c 4 0
# ln console systty
o restored /etc/rc.d/*
o rebooted
I have no idea why these /et/rc.d/ files effected the time length
of the warning messages, but by renaming them I was able to boot
and login.
I hear that older versions of Init (i'm on slackware 3.0 fall95)
don't know how to cleanly reboot from an xdm session, and can cause
these problems. The new one apparently does-- I haven't seen these
problems in a *long* time.
Brian Kimball
ps- is linux-net really the appropriate place for this question? :)