How to overcome a boot-up endless loop?

[Josef Lowder]

> Recently, I found a way to put my IBM Thinkpad T40 running PCLinuxOS
> to sleep rather than turning it off by using: apm -s
>
> This has worked well for a couple of months with instant restarts
> whenever I opened the lid ... until yesterday. Something went amiss,
> and when I tried to restart, I saw this repeating endlessly:
>
> /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit: line 1333: /bin/usleep: Input Output error
>
> So, I tried rebooting ... same thing ... and now I can't get the
> system to boot at all.
>
> How can I recover from this?

Eric Shubert wrote:
> Have you tried a hard power off?

Yes.

And I've tried booting Knoppix (which works fine) and going to the partition
where /bin/usleep resides and saving it as usleepx and creating a temporary
usleep that just contains "echo hello" to see if I could get around the problem
that way, but that did not work.