Hello,

All of a sudden my centos install will not boot. Its starts then after about 10 minutes of a blank screen it finally gets to the username / password screen. I enter the correct details and then it’s just displays a black screen with the cursor and does not move.

I've selected the recovery session and now I'm faced with the following command prompt:

[root@localhost ~]#

Being very new to Linux I don't know what commands to type here in order to fix or at least identify the problem. I wish to be careful that I don't make matters worse.

Any suggestions appreciated.

One of the first things would not be to run diagnostics but track back what changes you made. Maybe you removed the "localhost" entry from /etc/hosts ('less /etc/hosts'), making for instance your MTA halt bootup until name resolution times out, maybe you tweaked some configuration script, maybe you have a hardware problem, et cetera. If that ain't it or you don't know next would be to inspect the system logs starting with /var/log/messages ('less /var/log/messages'). If that ain't it either then consider anything you think might help relevant to post. Log lines, error messages, hints, hunches, whatever.