dealing with boot hangs

[Chris Campbell_1]

I have had issues in the past where a misconfiguration has caused a daemon (such as nfsd) to not start and hang the HP-UX boot process. Is there any way to break out of this and have HP-UX continue loading with the next daemon in the startup sequence?

Also, is there a keystroke sequence (like CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE on XFree86) that will kill the X server?


Thanks in advance,
Chris

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Chris:

Try the "control" key plus "pipe" (|) key sequence.

...JRF...

[Wieslaw Krajewski]

Hi,

The fastest way to break booting process that hung is to press the Break key.

But this stop this process and as I remember well other processes do not start either. But you have a possibility to correct mistakes that make starting processes hanging.

Rgds.

[Trevor Dyson]

Hi,

To interrupt the run control scripts (eg if the boot process hangs at NFS startup) use ctrl-\ (control-backslash)....only one is not enough so pretend you are playing space invaders (rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat...). This will bypass all other start up scripts and give you a log in prompt so when you fix up the problem causing the hang you will need to do a reboot to ensure that the OS is in a consistent state.

By the way the most common cause of a hang at the NFS startup point is a mismatch between the hostname configured in /etc/rc.config.d/netconf and /etc/hosts (or DNS/NIS if used) or some other typo in netconf.

To break out of an X session is shift-control-break, but this may not work with CDE, you might have to do a ps -ef and grep for dtlogin and kill its PID.

Cheers, Trevor.

[CHRIS_ANORUO]

Hi Chris,

I go with Trevor. As the booting process has not gotten to CDE level/startup break the startup process with ctrl-\ (control-backslash), other startup processes after this point will not run

Regards!


Chris

[Wieslaw Krajewski]

Hi again,

I confirm what I said before. Pressing Break key stops in general starting process that hung booting. And all remaining processes do not start either.

According to HP Break key is designated to break hanging booting.

Although it often happens that pressing the combination of keys Ctrl + \ do the same. But this depends on the hanging process. Simply Ctrl + \ sends from keyboard signal number 3, that means Quit with coredump. How process react to this signal depends on the process itself, i.e. how particular signals are processed.

Hope this helps.

Rgds.