At 11:08 PM +0900 11/4/97, Mark Andres wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I am using a Macintosh IIcx with 20MB of RAM, a 730MB Quantum HD, and was
>previosuly running 1.2.1.  I downloaded the 1.3-ALPHA snapshot for the
>mac68k port. I am now in the process of installing it.  I am following the
>same procedure I used to upgrade from 1.2 to 1.2.1.  Namely,
>
>I booted single user and mounted my partitions read/write.
>
>I went to the root directory ( cd / ) and then did
>
>   tar --unlink -zxvpf base.tar.gz
>
>This was the base snapshot for 1.3-ALPHA.  Tar did its stuff and seemed to
>untar everything without any problems.  However, now I cannot use any
>commands.  All commands come up with the same error message:
>
>  Bad system call - core dumped
>
>I tried 'ls', 'tar', 'cat', even 'halt' and 'shutdown' do not work.  At
>this point, I am wide open to suggestions, since I cannot even shutdown my
>system.
>

hmm, this sounds familiar. i got the same or extremely similar results when
i booted GENERICSBC#26 (most recent kernel that can boot on my IIvx) with a
-current (9-28-97) snapshot.
to shut the machine down (cause i couldn't either) i just synced the disk
and restarted. couldn't do much else. :-\
  - a

 Armen Babikyan - armenb@moof.ai.mit.edu - http://electron.xeo.net
               ----<insert lame quote here>----