Freeze when rebooting
 

My linux server (Fedora) was very slow, so I tried to reboot it

But when it restarted, the following screen appeared
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b3...j/IMG_7521.jpg
It freezed at the screen and didn't go ahead.

But when I pressed "ctrl + c", it could be skipped.
Then the following screen appeared
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b3...j/IMG_7522.jpg
At that moment, no matter I pressed what buttons, it always freezed and didn't give response.

Can anyone help me?
Thanks!!

Re: Freeze when rebooting
 

Are you sure your harddisk is still working and has not been damaged? It looks as if the kernel is somehow unable to mount the disk. Did you shut down cleanly? I. e. did you reboot by type

reboot

or

shutdown -r now

??

Do you have a rescue disk (the first installation disk) available, and can you boot from that?

If you can boot from a rescue disk, AND access your disk (it should be mounted in /mnt/sysimage after the rescue disk boot) its a good sign - it should mean that your disk is still physically there. Not much you can do there though - if it does work, it might still mean that a vital part of your disk (maybe the partition table?) has been damaged or been corrupted.

If your disk IS, in fact, physcially ok, I think that this might be time to reach for that nifty backup-DVD/CD and reformat and reinstall. Are you maybe running Windows as well on that machine? It is not beyond probability that a Windows virus / worm could damage the harddrive partition table, which will render Windows as well as Linux (or any other operating system) inoperable...

Regards,

Thanks for your reply, rylan76

The server was very slow. I tried "init 6" to restart it but it didn't work.
Then I switched off the power and started it again.

I can boot the server with a rescue disk, so I think the harddisk is fine.
Are there any methods, instead of formatting and reinstalling?

Thanks!!

That switchoff probably was the thing that crippled it - what filing system were you using? If it was ext2 you are out of luck - with older RedHat versions I more than once ended up with an inconsistent filing system after a "hard" shutdown - which neccessitated a complete reformat and reinstall. It is much better to use a journalling filesystem like ext3. If you were, in fact, using ext3 already, you're just out of luck.

As for fixing the problem, you might try to run

fsck

after the rescue disk has booted up and see if you can somehow fix something - no idea how, or where though. Usually it is just better and less effort to just reformat and reinstall. We used to get errors of this type in SCO unix at work as well, and there was -no way- to fix them once they began. It probably requires a Linux systems programmer or somebody who knows the particular filing system from the inside out.

Hope you've got some backups! :)

Seriously, the only course of action I could advise is to reformat, reinstall, and recover from backups. It will be quicker and waste less time than trying to reconstruct the disk by hand, which is well-nigh impossible IMHO.