System hanging at boot

bscott at ntisys.com bscott at ntisys.com
Fri May 30 17:43:55 EDT 2003


On Fri, 30 May 2003, at 5:21pm, bayard at tds.net wrote:
> Is it possible that Charlie lost his swap disk or that something else in
> that string of initiations went thump?

  Anything is possible, but I don't think so.  The "Freeing unused kernel
memory" message occurs occurs immediately before the kernel tries to start
"init".  Charlie indicates that it is the last thing he sees on his console
before the machine hangs.  There should be quite a few more messages before
the system actually gets around to adding swap space.

  I think it is quite possible that Charlie has lost his *root* disk, or
part of it, such that when the kernel tries to read the contents of
/sbin/init from the disk, it hangs.

  Charlie, how long have you waited after the hang?  Have you tried waiting
a minute or two?  If not, perhaps if you wait that long you will see a
timeout or other error from the disk controller.

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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