After 6 months of no problems with FC4, it stalled when I rebooted it. In the starting sequence, it hangs after creating the swap file. I can boot it to emergency mode but not single mode.
Is it possible to boot FC4 manually, as with Autoexec in old days, and thereby find where it hangs?
Is there any bootlog file I can look at, and where is it located?
Thanks for your input, Halldor

The log file is called dmesg. Where it is stored depends on your distribution and settings. There is a command also called "dmesg" which will print out the log.

Manually booting is a bit fuzzy. In the bootloader give the parameter 1 (the number one) to the kernel parameters. It will be handed to the init script, forcing it to circumvent the setting in the initrc file and boot to runlevel 1 (single user offline console). Perhaps that will work. Alternatively try to remove the swap entry from the fstab file (/etc/fstab) to diagnose if this really is the problem (it might be the very next entry that makes the problems, not the mounting of the sw3ap space).

The first option, boot into single user, causes same problem, system hangs.
The second one, is maby the task to attack. How do I stop the boot process to prevent the system running into to bottleneck and to be able to access the file system?

tough one. Usually loading swap memory is a top priority for any system to accomodate the boot process. As far as I can tell, mounting swap partitions is frequently even encorporated into the initfs itself.

I would run a rescue system, knoppix or DamnSmallLinux, in order to access the filesystem.

While you are at it, try to find the dmesg log. It might help out. On my system there is a further log in /var/log called boot.log, perhaps that might help us to diagnose the problem as well.

Yes, it's a tough one.

I have found out that the file system has somehow crashed, why I don't know. Maby the HD, I haven't checked that yet.

I managed to copy all the data from the primary HD (hda) to a seperate HD (hdb) and reinstalled FC4 on a new HD that I had. Thereafter I copied all the data back to the new HD and everything is fine, except some Samba finetuning.

When I'm done I will install hdb in my new linux box and activate mirror dir to mirror data from hda to hdb.

Thanks for the assistance

You are welcome.