Following a physical move of the computer, it does not quite finish the boot sequence.
No errors are shown but during the list of scripts from /etc/rc.d/rd3.d printed on screen I see
--------------
Mounting other filesystems
starting ntpd:
starting automount: No Mountpoints defined
.
.
several more apparently successful script run
.
.
Starting anacron:
Starting atd:
nohup appending output to 'nohup.out'
--------------

At this point nothing more happens. It should go next to a login prompt I believe, but the sequence stops, with no error message. The nohup message *might* be related to a local init command to start a program with a nohup, but that message may be something the system does.

If it is the local init command how can I edit it? The machine is a server and seldom reboots, but needs to be able to start some extra programs automatically. I think we did put a program that has output to nohup.out in rc.local about 3 months ago, and may have gotten the syntax wrong. The boot is managed by a graphic loader which I think is called grub. Is there a way to bypass the init scripts, especially the rc.local, and get to a prompt?

I hope someone might have some insight on what is happening here. I am running a fairly recent RedHat distribution, with 2.4 kernel (2.4.?.21 I think).

Thanks,
Roger

either: boot with init=/bin/sh
^^^^^^^ your shell here

or: boot with knoppix

My boot sequence stopped just before the login prompt.
The reason was a badly formed command in my rc.local.
To fix it, of course I needed to edit the file, but how to do so if I had no login.
My boot loader is grub, the new loader provided in RedHat distro. It accepts
a few commands, including "e" for edit. This allowed me to add " single" to the
bootup script, and this directs the process to boot into single user mode. Since
single user mode does not invoke all the scripts, I got a login prompt and was
able to edit the problem script and reboot normally.