Fedora 14 hanging on boot
 

Hi ^^
I'm new to Linux so bear with me
My F14 PC (the only OS installed) hangs on boot.
After a normal shut down yesterday, I opened it but the boot lasts forever, pressed F8 to see what's going on, I found it hanging on "Starting SMB services" and generating errors (I'm not able to remember what they were) so I shut it down using the power button ^^'
Same thing over and over for about 4 times, then the fifth time I decided to wait (for sooo long) and it passed the boot and the GUI started
Not a long time after, the GUI suddenly stopped functioning, not knowing what I should do I again shut it down using the power button and then restarted it, this time it hangs again and after a long wait it displayed "Unable to mount root filesystem. Sleeping forever"

I tried over and over, it's always the same thing, whether hangs on Starting SMB services or just hangs and displays the Sleeping forever message I don't know what's wrong with it, and am not not sure what to do, I have a live usb with F13 but don't know what commands to run in it

Sorry for the long message and thanks for anyone who's willing to try to help me ^^

http://dc444.4shared.com/img/_JseHBXP/IMG1842A.jpg
http://dc440.4shared.com/img/WWLrwSe3/IMG1844A.jpg
http://dc222.4shared.com/img/iqFRTk7C/IMG1843A.jpg
http://dc438.4shared.com/img/gQodKgHA/IMG1845A.jpg

PS: Sorry for the bad quality of the images tried to take them while it's booting to show you the kind of messages that are displayed

The I/O errors and fsck make me think this could be a hard drive issue.

Was the computer fully functional before you installed Fedora? Any hard drive issues before this?

Thanks for replying ^^

Yes it was fully functional under WindowsXp, and for fully functional for quite long time under Fedora14
It didn't want to boot just after I shut it down using the power button for several times

Any suggestions to what I should do?

You could try booting to a previous kernel version. On boot when the grub splash appears strike the down arrow a couple of times, the top most entry should be the most recent kernel whereas the next one down should be a previous version. I had a boot time hang on a couple of laptops that were due to a Fedora 14 kernel update, perhaps the issue you are seeing is similar.

I would suggest you to try these steps. I followed them when I had same issue with my FC15.

First boot your system into single user mode,

1.At the GRUB splash screen at boot time, press any key to enter the GRUB interactive menu.
2.Select Fedora with the version of the kernel that you wish to boot and type a to append the line.
3.Go to the end of the line and type single as a separate word (press the Spacebar and then type single).
Press Enter to exit edit mode.
4.Now press b to boot.

Second,
1.Once you are logged into the single user mode and when you see # prompt, type "init 5" and press enter.
2.This way we are changing the runlevel to 5 which is multiuser mode.
3.Now that you can see the login screen , login with your username/password.
4.Reboot the computer after you are successfully logged into your computer and can see the desktop.
5.After reboot, your computer should boot normally.

you might want to download fedora 16
Seeing as fedora 14 is now DEAD
it is End Of Life
there will never be any more support for 14

Thanks for replying ^^

I tried but the same errors show and it hangs..

Thanks for replying ^^

I did what you said but at First-3 when I press Enter it directly boots (without pressing b) and doesn't just exit the edit mode
So no single mode, and nothing changes :(

Thanks for replying ^^

I would love to download and install F16 but I have an old laptop with just 1GB RAM so F14 is my best option for now ^^

instead of using a dead and unsupported version why not use a supported OS

I have ScientificLinux6.1 running just fine on a 10+ year old Desktop
a 11 year old intel p4
256 meg upgraded to 1 gig RAM
nvidia gforce2 mx 400 card ( no longer supported by nvidia ) using nouveau
a added on usb2 card ( usb 1 installed by OEM )
and a 3.5 in floppy drive

That sounds good ^^
But the problem that I'm just switching from Windows so I wanted a Linux distro that makes me feel at home at least at the beginning and a distro that I have the minimum requirements ^^

But I don't know about ScientificLinux6.1.. have some screenshots?

sl6 is a rebuild of red hat RHEL6
http://scientificlinux.org/
and so is CentOS 6
http://centos.org/

Its really hard to guess for the error with the link of image

you can try this

go to single user console
restart the machine

and if everything works fine check for the logs and samba services.