hang during booting :(
 

My redhat linux 2.4.18-14 hung during booting after last Thursday's blackout :( :

----------------
Initializing USB mode... [ok]
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit: line 187 100 segmentation fault. grep -iq ...

Check root file system...
/: clean [ok]

/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit: line 274 109 segmentation fault....
Remounting root filesystem in read-writing mode [ok]
Activating swap partitions [ok]
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit: line 339 129 segmentation fault....
Find module dependencies [ok]
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit: line 381 179 segmentation fault....
Check filesystems
/boot : clean
[ok]
Mounting local filesystems [ok]
Enabling local filesystem quotas [ok]
------------------

Then it just hung here :(

1) Any idea what this problem is? And how to fix it?
2) I tried boot to rescue mode, chroot /mnt/sysimage, cd /var/log/, boot.log has 0 byte, and messages.log last changed date is 2003-08-14, where do I get logs of the boot process? (I wrote the above log on pater and keyed them in...)
3) I have tried boot to rescure mode, chroot /mnt/sysimage, fsck e2fsck /dev/hda2... , but it still won't boot after that.
4) What do those "segmentation fault" indicate?

Any input would be greatly appreciated, thanks! :)

The segmentation fault messages are from programs that are dying horrible deaths as your system tries to boot. The number just before the word "segmentation" in each message is the process ID of the program that's dying. Boot to rescue mode and look at your /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit script. See what's on lines 100, 187, 274, 339 and 381, which are the lines that run the programs that are failing. This will tell you what programs those are, and from the script context you might be able to tell what it's failing to do.

My rc.sysinit apparently does not correspond to yours (my line 100 is a blank line, for instance), so I can't tell you more.

It's possible that your system got a power spike just before the power went out, and some stuff on the disk got fried. Not too likely, however, but possible. I can't imagine why you would suddenly get seg-faults on system tools like this.

Oh, I should explain: a segmentation fault occurs when a process attempts to access memory that is not mapped to it. The kernel allocates memory for a process, and controls the mapping of physical memory to the virtual address space that the process sees. So while your process may be able to address 4GB of memory on a 32-bit box, much of that address space is unmapped. If the process pulls some random number into a register and attempts to use that as an address into memory, the hardware that controls memory mapping will interrupt the process, and the kernel will kill it off because it has behaved badly.

Thanks very much for the feedback and detailed explanation Mack! :)

I read the rc.sysinit, but dont' understand what went wrong...

Since I have application data backed up, I figured it would be easier for me just to re-install OS.

Just want to say thanks! :)