[BusyBox] suddenly, busybox init process is failing spectacularly

[Robert P. J. Day]

  after having built and successfully downloaded and booted a
busybox-based system for a target board, i went in and tweaked what i
thought were some minor config options in BB, and suddenly the boot
process was failing miserably.  after backing off to what should have been
a working configuration from the CVS repository, it's *still* failing, and
i've spent the last three hours trying to track down the problem.

  currently, i have busybox emulating "init", with a fairly simple
/etc/inittab file:
-----------------------------
::sysinit:/etc/rc.sh
tts/0::respawn:-/bin/sh
#::respawn:/usr/sbin/xinetd -stayalive -reuse -pidfile /tmp/xinetd.pid
#::respawn:/bin/application
-----------------------------

while /etc/rc.sh starts with:
-----------------------------
#!/bin/sh

# Configure local networking.

echo "Configuring localhost networking ..."
/sbin/ifconfig lo 127.0.0.1

# Clear the mount table.

echo "Clearing mount table in /etc/mtab ..."
>/etc/mtab

# Mount the /proc filesystem.

echo "Mounting /proc filesystem ..."
/bin/mount -t proc proc /proc

... and a bunch of other stuff, snipped for brevity.
--------------------------------

  until now, this has been working wonderfully.  then, after my tweaks, i
downloaded the ramdisk image, whereupon the boot produced:

-----------------------------------------
RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
Freeing initrd memory: 1110k freed
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem).
Mounted devfs on /dev
Freeing unused kernel memory: 60k init
Bumme       <---- ??????????????????????????????????????
Please press Enter to activate this console.


BusyBox v1.00-pre7 (2004.02.21-11:53+0000) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

-sh: can't access tty; job control turned off
-----------------------------------------

  normally, at this point, i expect to see INIT start up and start running
everything in /etc/rc.sh.  instead, i get the chopped off string "Bumme"
and nothing being run out of /etc/inittab, apparently.  (annoyingly, 
minicom insists on chopping off that error string, which is unfortunate 
since i assume seeing the whole thing might have been informative.  more
on that shortly.)

  i have no idea why init suddenly stopped running.  it's clearly selected
in the BB configuration.  in an effort to figure out what the rest of that
"Bumme" message might have been, i finally resorted to tracking down 
*every* location in the BB-1.00-pre7 code that printed a message starting
with that, and added a unique character to the beginning.  most of those 
were in init.c, and one in syslogd.c.  (can you tell i'm getting 
desperate?)

  i rebuilt BB, actually ran "strings" on the executable, verified that 
all of those strings had a unique character at the beginning, rebuilt my 
downloadable ramdisk, downloaded and booted to get:

Mounted devfs on /dev
Freeing unused kernel memory: 60k init
Bumme          <--- argh!!  where is this coming from?
Please press Enter to activate this console.

  at this point, i'm kind of beside myself with frustration.  for those
who are familiar with the boot procedure, once the kernel gets past the 
mount of devfs and freeing unused kernel memory, what would you expect
to see?  from memory, i was sure that that was where init kicked in.
so where could that message be coming from?  

  i'm definitely open to suggestions.

rday

p.s.  once i get a console, if i run "mount", i get the error message

# mount
mount: /proc/mounts: No such file or directory

but i can manually mount that with

# mount -t proc proc /proc

and manually do the rest of what's in /etc/rc.sh.  so, clearly, init isn't 
doing any of that at boot time.  what could be causing init to simply not
run properly?  this worked so nicely for the last couple of days.