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linux server wont shutdown

I am using a older distribution of linux, Fedora Core 6. I know its probably time to upgrade but that's a job for another day.

Right now the problem I am having is the shutdown command is not functioning. Shutting down or rebooting from Xwindows does the same thing. The shutdown command sends out a warning to all terminals then does nothing. The system continues to function as if the shutdown command was never used. If I use the ps command to look at processes i can see shutdown running. I am out of ideas on where to look to find what is causing the problem. I have found nothing useful in /var/log. Anyone have any ideas I can look into?

# shutdown -r now

Code:

Broadcast message from root (pts/4) (Tue Oct 20 02:31:41 2009):



The system is going down for reboot NOW!



Broadcast message from root (pts/5) (Tue Oct 20 01:56:09 2009):



The system is going down for reboot NOW!

It just hangs there with no additional info. No services are stopping, no filesystems unmounted and so on.

Is reboot command working ?

Probably is a "zombie" process what cannot be stopped.

Regards

reboot
shutdown -h now
shutdown -r now

They all do the same thing. The command displays the warning then nothing.

Well I finally fixed the problem. Anyone know an easier way for me to track down this problem in the future rather than my 100 guesses to finally find the problem? It's frustrating that something wasn't printed in /var/log/messages.

I had an external USB hard drive attached to the server. About a week ago we had multiple power failures that drained the battery backups and the servers were forced off and on several times causing lots of file systems errors on the external USB drive (ext3). To fix the reboot problem I simply loaded a linux rescue disk and ran

e2fsck -y -C hd /dev/sdb1

It found a ton of errors, fixed them and then after remounting the drive I was able to issue the appropriate shutdown commands.