On 27/07/07 23:08, Zhi-Wei Lu wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I was playing with Sophos Antivirus for Linux (not really necessary in
> my opinion, but ...) for an SL 5.0 system, the antivirus program crashed
> the system.  I managed to remove the Sophos Antivirus software using the
> install DVD.  However, the system crashes very early on in the booting
> process.  It sets the hostname, then it tries to do LVM stuff and
> something (fly by too quickly), then it crashes.  I couldn't get too
> much from the kernel panic messages, it mentions about ext3 filesystem
> calls and among other.  Is there a way to capture all the booting
> message to a file?

/var/log/boot.log will contain some, but if the system goes down hard
enough these maessages may actually not make it to disk. Especially if
the crash occurs before the "/"-filesystem gets remounted in r/w-mode.

Other than that, you could set up a serial console. This should capture
the system output during early boot reliably.

> I suspect that it may be a problem with LVM and I played with SL5 liveCD
> and Install CD in the rescue mode, I was able to mount the logical
> volume without any problem.  Any suggestion of how I should proceed!  I
> did try the rc.sysinit
> LVM commands by hand while in the LiveCD mode, the system was fine.

Since Sophos promises to do "on-access" scanning on certain
distributions, it could possibly be hooked up via a kernel module. I'd
check /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit for modifications from Sophos, such as
inserting modules (both "hostname setting" and "LVM setup" should happen
in that script).

Regards
jan