[lug] Unable to cleanly reboot

[Michael Deck]

Help! I'm unable to reboot my Linux box without a hard reset (and fsck all 
drives). When, as root, I type "reboot" it goes through the steps of stopping 
relevant services and then says, "No more processes in this runlevel" but 
then it just hangs. Unlike it did before (or on my other Linux boxen) where 
it pauses and then the md recovery thread gets woken up which powers off or 
reboots the box. This is a huge drag. I really need some advice on how to fix 
this because it's 15 minutes to reboot otherwise. I'm not (presently) running 
X so the default runlevel is 3. 

Here's what has been happening on this box, in case it's of use. 

I've been trying to replace Mandrake 7.2 with KRUD 9-01 for the past 3 days. 
First, I couldn get initrd.img to boot and the hardware was suspected. So I 
put a newer CDROM drive in and tried again. 

Booting worked, but I was getting sporadic failures to find rpm files during 
the actual install. Each of these install attempts left the system in a more 
or less unusable state. I did go back and re-install Mandrake from CD 
successfully but it has many older RPMs and (unfortunately) at some point I 
trashed /usr so my various patches and updates were lost. Sigh. 

This morning I figured out how to do a hard-disk based install and tried 
that. This particular box can't successfully copy the CD's but I was able to 
us another Linux box to copy them into ISO images and then upload them to the 
target system. Voila!, I thought, and I (once again) commenced the KRUD 
installation. Text mode, but it got done. 

But it still has this same ugly problem of not shutting down cleanly. 

Your suggestions appreciated!

-Mike