Hello,

I have an old 32 bits Slackware installed on a server (don't remember version but dmesg says kernel is 2.6.24.5).

The boot process ends before asking loging, with a bash prompt "sh-3.1#" and waiting.

dmesg doesn't show hardware failure : the last lines from dmeg are :
kjournald starting commit 5 seconds
EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
VFS: Mounted root (ext3 filesystem) readonly.
Freeing unused kernel memory: 380k freed

This followed by bash prompt waiting forever : sh-3.1#

Does anybody have an idea of what's happening ?

Looks like Slackware 12.1 booting into single-user mode

This may give you some ideas: https://ebookreading.net/view/book/EB0130253952_4.html

You'll need to provide more clues... Welcome to LQ! Tell us more....

Thanks for the pointer, it was hepfull.

This is a standard Slackware 12.1 32 bits install and boots from Lilo (no other OS installed)

At first, the fs was so corrupted (power failure), that the boot process couldn't even reach the Lilo prompt.

A repair was attempted via booting from Slackware' CD + running fsck on the HD' root partition of the server

Now Lilo executes normaly, however if IIUIC (per your link), the call to the shell is likely the result of a failure of init program.

Tried to locate this init program but no success (find and slocate not recognised by the shell and
surprisingly /sbin is absent when doing "ls" on /)

A LiveSlak USB stick would probably be a big help if you can use anything 64bit on that PC. If that isn't possible I suggest HirensBootCD 15.2 which has DOSTools, a Windows PE GUI, and a very decent Linux Desktop and boatloads of tools.

Yeah, looks like it's booting into runlevel 1.

If this is old hardware, perhaps it's starting to fail?