29/06/2020 System gets stuck/hung while booting with message "Rebuilding /boot/initrd-xxx-kdump.

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System gets stuck/hung while booting with

message "Rebuilding /boot/initrd-xxx-kdump.img"
$ SOLUTION VERIFIED - Updated June 22 2020 at 2:07 PM - English ()

Environment
RHEL 5
RHEL 6

Issue
While booting system gets stuck/hung at message "Rebuilding /boot/initrd-xxx-
kdump.img"
After patching system gets stuck/hung at message "Rebuilding /boot/initrd-xxx-
kdump.img" for more than 30 minutes

Resolution
To workaround this behavior boot the system into the older kernel.
Turn off the Kdump service at startup. This will allow the system to boot without the kdump
service.

# chkconfig kdump off

For RHEL6 systems if you are booting with crashkernel=auto replace it with either
crashkernel=128M or crashkernel=256M . This is not necessary for RHEL5 systems.
After booting up we will have to manually rebuild the kdump initrd.

# touch /etc/kdump.conf
# service kdump start

Once the service starts successfully, enable the kdump service back and it is preferred to
reboot the system.

If the system happens to be a RHEL 5.3 or Rhel 5.3 +, Please check if there are any custom
modification on file "/etc/init.d/functions". Because system running on Rhel5.3+ does not
populate "/var/log/boot.log" . Please refer the below article for more information.

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logging (/var/log/boot.log) in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5?
(https://access.redhat.com/solutions/9834) 

Root Cause
This behavior can occur if you Install/Update a new kernel or if there are any changes to
"kdump.conf" file prior to the reboot.
Sometime systems might take a long time to rebuild the initrd image as it depends on the
modules which needs to be included and this might be different for each environment.
Or it could also be possible that the kdump service is stuck and this needs to be
investigated further.
So the threshold or waiting time can be around 10 minutes.

Diagnostic Steps
One way to check if the system is hung or not is by trying to switch the terminals i.e
[Cntrl+Alt+Fn]

Product(s) Red Hat Enterprise Linux (/taxonomy/products/red-hat-enterprise-linux)

Component kexec-tools (/components/kexec-tools)

Category Troubleshoot (/category/troubleshoot) Tags kdump (/tags/kdump) kexec (/tags/kexec)

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