I am doing a new install of centos 5.2 on a machine with Intel Core2 DUO 2.40GHz 1066FSB 4M LGA775 processor, 4 - 128x64 1GB 667MH DDR2 DIMM memory, Intel DQ965CO uBTX motherboard, and Hitachi 160GB SATA-300 hard drive. I plan to run Asterisk so just did a fairly basic install with no GUI. After installation (ocurred error free), upon reboot, it hangs at "starting udev:" and eventually says "timeout - will continue in background" and then "failed". Everything else loads normally and all hardware seems to work. Updates and additional packages can be installed. When I try to reinstall udev it says it is already installed. I've not installed Asterisk yet because it says it needs udev to work. Any idea what the problem might be? I am very new at this so don't assume I know how to do/check anything.

The configuration files for udev are in /etc/udev. You might want to see if there is anything there causing your issue.

Running "/sbin/start_udev" makes it try to restart udev. If you make changes to configuration (which you shouldn't until you're sure why you're having the issue) you can run that. You can also run that to see if you get more detail on why it is failing rather than having to do a full reboot.

There are udev related man pages. You could start with "man udev". You can run "rpm -ql udev" to see all the files installed by the udev package including other man pages.

Although I've done some configuration of udev for Oracle and LVM I'm no expert on it and haven't seen the problem you're experiencing but hopefully the above at least gives you some information to get started.

As a final thought - during boot up often the last thing you see on the screen isn't the thing that is failing. Sometimes it is the thing after that. If you don't see any issues running /sbin/start_udev you might want to check to see what is started after udev in your init scripts.

Thanks for your suggestions. I tried manually restarting udev using the "/sbin/start_udev" and got the same result - "starting udev:timeout will continue in the background [failed].
When I look at the udev.config file the only thing in it is the following:
#The initial syslog(3) priority: "err", "info", "debug" or its
#numerical equivalent. For runtime debugging, the daemons internal
#state can be changed with: "udevcontrol log-priority=<value>.
udev_log="err"
Obviously, from looking at typical udev.config files there should be more in the file than that. Any other suggestions? Could I remove udev and try to reinstall it. (And how would I do that?)