Thanks to all that replied.  I had previously edited /etc/ttys to add secure
on the console, so I couldn't figure out why it didn't work.

Seth, you were right on the money!  I found two devices, /rmt12, and /rra0g
with 0 and 0 as major/minor IDs.  I really can't figure why rra0g could be a
terminal!

Theory:  I have a G partition on my winch. It is not initialised.  Could it
be that MAKEDEV finds it and assigns it a null ID because it can't find
anything about it, this causing the confusion?

I don't know what an rmt12 is, but I deleted it anyway.

Once again, thanks to all

Nigel


Seth J. Morabito wrote:

> Hi Nigel,
>
> I had this same problem, and I think it may be a really weird obscure
> thing that came from my netbooting for the first time to install.
>
> By default, you're only allowed to log on as root from /dev/console.
> That's all fine and good, except when it won't let you :)  I discovered,
> in my case at least, that some part of the initial startup, probably
> before I ran MAKEDEV for the first time, left a strange .nfsfoo (or
> something) file in my /dev directory, which had the same major and
> minor device id's as /dev/console had.  When my system came up, I was
> then trying to log on using the console /dev/.nfsfoo, not /dev/console,
> and the system said "No! Bad root! No cookie!"
>
> I booted into single user mode, removed /dev/.nfsfoo by hand, made sure
> /dev/console was there and had the right major and minor device nodes
> and the correct permissions, then rebooted.  It worked nicely.
>
> You might be experiencing a different problem, but it sounds just like
> my symptoms.  Give my solution a try, see if it works.