Comment 1 for bug 120483

I'm having the same trouble except that I don't see the /dev/null error, although it may flash by too fast for me to read. I get a slew of complaints about sed before the system hangs.

I added "single" to the boot options of my nfs bootup, and successfully got to a root prompt. The only problem I had during the boot (that I could catch) was a timeout trying to mount my samba share. From there I could do pretty much anything that I wanted. The network was up, I had internet access, I could nfs share other file systems, I could start X and get a full desktop etc.

Once I verifiied everything was looking good, I went back to the root prompt and entered "telinit 2". From there it was all bad. Avahi timed out, so I removed that from the startup and tried again, and next the "network manager" (i think it was called) failed after that. Once that happened I got a flash of messages, and the last screen was full of startup script failures complaining they couldn't find "sed" (it's in /bin and does exist on the system). Since the system hangs at that point I can only guess what went wrong. I assume something is blowing away my root file system.

Next I'll start manually running the rc2.d scripts and see if I can narrow down what's causing all the fuss.