[PLUG] Strange Shutdown & Reboot Problems

[Rich Shepard]

  Several weeks ago the power supply failed on my main system (RH 7.3). I
replaced that, and updated the ancient floppy drive, and booted the system
into the same 2.4.19 kernel I've been running the past couple of years.

  Then I discovered the floppy drive cable was upside down (a keyed cable
does no good when the socket is keyed on both sides) so I halted the system
to fix this problem. The shutdown process hung when trying to umount /usr.
Messages about it not being available and umount2 having other problems.
Very strange. Never saw this before on any system. I turned off the box with
the power switch and proceeded to fix the floppy drive cable. Sewed it up
and booted into the 2.4.19 kernel.

  A week or so ago I discovered that the cdrom drive was not recognized by
the system. I assumed the problem was a poorly seated cable from my previous
surgery on the box and I postponed fixing it because there are more
important things to do.

  Yesterday morning seemed like a good time to fix the cdrom drive cable.
When shutting down the system it hung at the same point as before. Held in
the power switch until it expired. Fixed the loose cable (one side was out a
bit) and put the case together. Plugged everyone in and powered on. Kernel
panic when trying to initialize VFS. How strange! Also, saw messages about
problems with USB which should not be there as I have no USB sockets on this
box and did not build the 2.4.19 kernel with USB support.

  To make a long story shorter, it will not boot the 2.4.19 kernel any
longer. The only reason it's now up and running is that I could boot into
single user mode with the 2.4.18-10 kernel, then telinit 3 to switch to
multiuser mode. No NFS. No VMware. Printing didn't work (but cupsd is
running). Figuring it was time to upgrade kernels after a couple of years I
downloaded 2.4.27 and ran make menuconfig (no USB support at all), followed
by make dep; clean; bzImage; modules; modules_install. Moved the kernal and
System.map to /boot, rebuilt the soft links and fixed /boot/grub/grub.conf
to place the new kernel first. Tried rebooting into the 2.4.27 kernel.
Exactly the same response as with the 2.4.19 kernel! USB issues and hanging
on VFS init. As far as I can tell, the process is identical on both the
2.4.19 and 2.4.27 boot sequences.

  So, here I am running 2.4.18-10 with a partially-crippled system and
absollutely no clue what happened or why the new kernel won't boot. And --
of course -- it's the end of the month with all the administrative and
last-minute project work to be completed by tomorrow afternoon. A brand new
experience for me. I need help.

Thanks,

Rich

--
Dr. Richard B. Shepard, President
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM)
<http://www.appl-ecosys.com>