Problem with RHEL 5.7 booting up on a cluster storage server
 

I have a RHEL 5.7 on a storage server from SuperMicro(SC836). I am not able to boot the machine. I think it had SELinux enabled on it though I am not sure if that's the cause of the problem. The booting proceeds till a point like below and then just doesn't proceed further.

EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
SELinux: Disabled at runtime.
type=1404 audit(1337943074.817:2): selinux=0 auid=4294967295 ses=4294967295

I have been working on this problem for more than a week and once I waited a bit more than 48 hours and it still didn't work.

The machine has a 3-ware hardware RAID controller. It had 14 disks on it totally(say disk0 to disk13 for the purpose of this post) out of which disk0(or the first one) just died recently. The machine has a RAID controller and the first 2 disks(WDC disks of 250GB each) were mirrored(RAID-1) and the next 12 disks each 1TB Hitachi disk were setup with RAID-6 with total capacity of 9TB.

I have also tried the options on the kernel command line on the GRUB but without any success
1. adding enforcing=0
2. adding selinux=0
3. single (for single user mode)

I tried to test the disks 0 and 1 and while I was doing that one of disks(disk 0) died.
Finally I also tried pulling out all the storage disks(the 1 TB disk) and also disk 0 out and boot with only disk 1. Still it doesn't get me past the above point.

I am clueless on how to troubleshoot this issue as I am not able to see what is going on once this point is reached. I do not see any blue lights on the disk so assume there is no disk activity. I sincerely request for help on this issue. Is it the case that if any

I am also attaching the screenshot of the final screen of output and also the 3-ware(RAID controller) dispaly on power ON. Among the disks on the screenshot right now the first WDC disk has died. Please let me know if posting any other details would be helpful.


UPDATE: I should also mention that this storage server was working fine as Network Attached Storage and looked pretty stable. It used to run as a NFS server. This problem started from when I once tried to do a Windows backup from a Windows 2003 server to this NAS machine. It caused an error then but it was my blunder to not have taken a screenshot of that error on the Windows backup.

here i am thinking that kernel is not able to see or having issue with kernel driver module may be missing for raid controller.

you should check for that.

Thank you very much em31amit. There was another option in the grub for another kernel version. I was extremely silly to have missed this. I tried that and it happened that this one had the extra kernel modules that were required! Now I commented out the section in the Grub for the kernel version that did not have the required kernel modules.

Thanks,
Ganesh