Crond freezing at startup.

[merper]

Hey guys,

I'm a newbie to the whole redhat/linux system, just using it at work, so please forgive my ignorance. Anyway, when going through the boot checklist, the OS keeps freezing at the "Starting crond" stage. At first I thought the glitch was something from the hard disk being nearly full(99%), but cutting that to 90 didn't resolve the issue. Also tried restarting the system from 4 different kernels, but that didn't fix anything either. To be honest, I don't know much more about the system than that. The only other notable error during the startup was a failure to mount the external hard drive, though I don't see how the two are related. If any of you veterans can figure out what's wrong with my system from my sparse ramblings, I would be most appreciative. I can probably add more information if it would help, I just don't want to post a whole bunch of potentially irrelevant material.

Thanks.

[tashirosgt]

Sometimes the process that freezes the system is the one just after the last one shown in the pre-freeze display. Can you tell anythings from the logs in /var/log ?
An interesting message about debugging the boot process (which may not be completely out of date vis-a-vis FC5) is:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedo.../msg07843.html

[tejas]

Can you boot into single user mode?

At grub screen, highlight FC, and press a

Add the word single to the end of the line, and press enter

start each service one by one, and see which service causes it to freeze

Ie:
service crond start

if it freezes on that line, then it is cron that's the problem.