View source for Xen CentOS/Fedora/Red Hat Guest OS Hangs During Boot

Solution: A partial output of the boot process prior to the boot appearing to hang is as follows:

<pre>
Creating root device.
Mounting root filesystem.
kjournald starting.  Commit interval 5 seconds
EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
Setting up other filesystems.
Setting up new root fs
no fstab.sys, mounting internal defaults
Switching to new root and running init.
unmounting old /dev
unmounting old /proc
unmounting old /sys
INIT: version 2.86 booting
                Welcome to  CentOS release 5 (Final)
                Press 'I' to enter interactive startup.
</pre>

The most common cause of this problem is an issue with the ''hwclock'' binary which is executed during this phase of the boot process. Since this program execution is not vital to the operation of the operating system the current solution is to replace this executable with an empty shell script.

At this point we are assuming that you have installed a root filesystem on either a physical disk partition or a disk image and are using this to load the guest domain within the Xen environment. If you are using a disk partition, change directory to the sbin directory of the root filesystem on that partition. If, on the other hand, you are using a disk image, mount the image using the loopback interface. For example:

<pre>
mount -o loop imagefile.img /mnt/loop
</pre>

Once you are in the sbin directory of the root filesystem of the guest OS rename the real hwclock binary to a backup file so that it can be put back in place at a later date if necessary, create a new hwclock shell script which simply exits and set appropriate execute permissions:

mv hwclock hwclock.original
echo "exit 0" > hwclock
chmod 755 hwclock

If using an image file unmount it from the loopback mount point and re-launch the guest domain. If the problem you were experiencing was related to the hwclock problem the boot should proceed beyond the point where it previously appeared to hang:

<pre>
Creating root device.
Mounting root filesystem.
kjournald starting.  Commit interval 5 seconds
EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
Setting up other filesystems.
Setting up new root fs
no fstab.sys, mounting internal defaults
Switching to new root and running init.
unmounting old /dev
unmounting old /proc
unmounting old /sys
INIT: version 2.86 booting
                Welcome to  CentOS release 5 (Final)
                Press 'I' to enter interactive startup.
Setting clock  (utc): Wed Mar 19 15:31:10 EDT 2008 [  OK  ]
Starting udev: [  OK  ]
Loading default keymap (us): [  OK  ]
Setting hostname centos5:  [  OK  ]
No devices found
Setting up Logical Volume Management:   No volume groups found
[  OK  ]
Checking filesystems
Checking all file systems.
[/sbin/fsck.ext3 (1) -- /] fsck.ext3 -a /dev/xvda1 
/dev/xvda1: clean, 73168/780288 files, 522900/1560576 blocks
[  OK  ]
Remounting root filesystem in read-write mode:  [  OK  ]
Mounting local filesystems:  [  OK  ]
Enabling local filesystem quotas:  [  OK  ]
Enabling /etc/fstab swaps:  [  OK  ]
INIT: Entering runlevel: 3
Entering non-interactive startup
Applying Intel CPU microcode update: [FAILED]
Starting background readahead: [  OK  ]
Checking for hardware changes [  OK  ]
Applying ip6tables firewall rules: [  OK  ]
Applying iptables firewall rules: [  OK  ]
Loading additional iptables modules: ip_conntrack_netbios_ns [  OK  ]
Bringing up loopback interface:  [  OK  ]
Bringing up interface eth0:  
Determining IP information for eth0... done.
[  OK  ]
Starting auditd: [  OK  ]
Starting system logger: [  OK  ]
Starting kernel logger: [  OK  ]
Starting irqbalance: [  OK  ]
Starting portmap: [  OK  ]
Starting NFS statd: [  OK  ]
Starting RPC idmapd: [  OK  ]
Starting system message bus: [  OK  ]
[  OK  ] Bluetooth services:[  OK  ]
Mounting other filesystems:  [  OK  ]
Starting PC/SC smart card daemon (pcscd): [  OK  ]
Starting hidd: [  OK  ]
Starting autofs:  Loading autofs4: [  OK  ]
Starting automount: [  OK  ]
[  OK  ]
Starting sshd: [  OK  ]
Starting ntpd: [  OK  ]
Starting console mouse services: [  OK  ]
Starting crond: [  OK  ]
Starting xfs: [  OK  ]
Starting anacron: [  OK  ]
Starting atd: [  OK  ]
Starting libvirtd daemon: [  OK  ]
Starting yum-updatesd: Bridge firewalling registered
[  OK  ]
Starting Avahi daemon... [  OK  ]
Starting HAL daemon: [  OK  ]
Starting smartd: [  OK  ]

CentOS release 5 (Final)
Kernel 2.6.18-53.1.14.el5xen on an i686
</pre>

[[Category:Virtualization Problem Solutions]]