Strange console-related hang at boot-time

  Hi all --

  Please let me know if this is the wrong forum for this query -- as you'll see by reading it, I don't yet know if it should be a bug report, but on the other hand, it's not really an installer question.

  I have a weird problem with a Debian "etch" file server. I've googled around and searched list archives, but I'm not finding anything helpful.

  The system is a dual Opteron 242 system with 4G of RAM, two 250G hard-drives in some RAID1 arrays (there are two partitions on each drive) with the "boot" and root filesystems on it, and a 3ware 9000 controller with eight more drives on it in RAID5 for a 2.6 TB-capacity array. The array holds files which are served by NFS by this server, mainly user accounts on our system.

  A few days ago, one of the RAID1 disks failed, and apparently took down the system, which then attempted to reboot, but the reboot hung part way through the process -- it seemed to be in /etc/rc2.d/S20 somewhere, the last message was from knfsd, which looked like it might be hung.

  I replaced the failed disk and sync'd up the RAID1, and it's still got the same problem. It's mounting the root filesystem OK, but it's not finishing the start-up scripts.

  The weird part is, under some circumstances (see below), I can boot it to single-user, and if I then run all the services in /etc/rc2.d/ manually, they all start up just fine. That's the condition it's in now, as a work-around to this problem, but I'm not happy with it, of course.

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  My first guess was some kind of file system damage from the crash, corrupting one or more of the start-up files, but since manual start-up works fine, this seems unlikely.

  However, there's a strange connection with the console devices. The system normally talks to a console server via ttyS0, but it won't even boot to single user unless I leave the "console=ttyS0,115200" argument out of the boot string.

  That's not the whole story either, though, because even if I leave the "console=ttyS0,115200" argument out of the boot string, it also won't boot to run level 2. It hangs in roughly the same place, with some but not all of the /etc/rc2.d/S20* scripts giving messages on the console. Of course, run-level 2 starts up a bunch of virtual consoles.

  So, at the end of the process, it seems as though there's some kind of problem with starting consoles, virtual or ttyS0, that's making the start-up process hang. This may include corrupted files somehow, of course, but I'm not sure where to look for problems.

  Are there start-up-sequence experts who can help me with this?

  Thanks.                 

• A.
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  Andrew Reid / reidac@bellatlantic.net

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