I am no longer able to shutdown my computer. The shutdown procedure starts, but freezes up at one point, displaying the following message:

"Starting killall [OK]
INIT: no more processes left in this runlevel"

After this, I can hear the hard drive "rattle" briefly--twice--during the first few seconds, then silence, and finally complete inactivity ensues indefinitely.

One confession: I did mess with the shell script called "halt", commenting out a soundmixer shutdown routine that was no longer needed; however, I backed up the original "halt" shell script, and have now restored it subsequent to my "shutdown" problem. Nonetheless, the shutdown problem persists.

I'm running RedHAt 9.0, kernel 2.4

It seems that "halt", even though restored may be damaged. So, how do I extract a fresh copy of "halt" from the RedHat RPMs? Or is that even possible? Maybe my shutdown problem is being caused by something else?

Any hints or help?

What happens when you run "shutdown -h"?

From a terminal window i ran:

/sbin/shutdown -h now

I got the same results as before: same hangup, same screen message.