How do you get a 6000 to boot the equivalent of single user?

[Paul Schinder]

[While I'm waiting for a phone call from IBM, I thought I might
try here]

We have a PowerStation 320, running AIX 3.1, which started acting up
last night by refusing to boot, and the console remains dark with no
information.  The initial reboot was done by a "shutdown -r"; when I
realized later that the machine hadn't rebooted, I found it showing a
three digit code "c99".  After several attempts to boot it, I loaded
standalone diagnostics from the floppies.  The hardware all checked
out.  Now when we try to boot it, the code is "553", which according
to a previous phone call from IBM means the inittab file is bad.
(Neither "c99" or "553" is in any of the documentation we have).

We have AIX on tape, but unfortunately our tape drive hasn't arrived
yet.  We don't have AIX floppies.  So there seems to be no other way
for us to boot AIX except from the preinstalled version on the hard
disk.  The man pages I've read seem to indicate that if booted in
maintainence mode, the inittab is ignored, but they don't say how
to boot in maintainence mode.

So *is* there an equivalent of single user mode on these machines?
How do you get it to come up that way?  And why is the console off so
far into the boot; how can you tell how the boot in going if the
console doesn't display any messages?

-- 
Paul J. Schinder
Department of Astronomy, Cornell University
schinder at astrosun.tn.cornell.edu