Respawning forever in 5 minute increments during system startup

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November 5, 1998
I am trying to bring up mgetty on a Linux system recently purchased from
RedHat and unable to get past the inittab setup.  From RedHat inittab is
setup like thus:
1:12345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1
2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty2
3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty3
etc. up to tty6

I can communicate using minicom on ttyS1.
A serial mouse is on com1.
The modem is on com2.

When I change the 1st inittab line from above to:
1:12345:respawn:/sbin/mgetty ttyS1
the system hangs during startup at "Starting SMB Services".
I think I got the same result when I used tty1 also, but that's not in
my notes.

When I change the 2nd line from above to:
2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mgetty tty2
or ttyS2
the system hangs during startup at "INIT: id2 respawning too fast:
disable for 5 minutes" forever in 5 minute increments.

When I change the 2nd line to:
2:2345:off::/sbin/mgetty tty2
the system starts, but ‘ps' does not show mgetty as an active process.

Thus far I haven't been able to uncover the solution from either ‘man
mgetty', ‘info mgetty', included system documentation or web sites that
I have visited.  I also haven't been able to view any log files because
I can't find them (apparently no policy.h included with RedHat Linux).

As I have to completely reload the system after each unsuccessful test I
am becoming discouraged.

If you haven't concluded, I am a Linux puppy (inexperienced).

Any comment or sympathy will be appreciated.

Rick Brown in Reno, NV