Comment 38 for bug 443080

On Mon, 2009-10-12 at 14:03 +0000, whoop wrote:

> What debug log? You mean mountall --debug or /var/log/debug?
> If I need to get something specific during that session, how do I do that if my system hangs?
>
mountall --debug

Easiest way is to probably edit /etc/init/mountall.conf and add

 --debug >/dev/mountall.log 2>&1

to the mountall invocation itself.

To get an emergency shell, try adding the following file
as /etc/init/debug.conf:

  start on startup and tty-device-added KERNEL=tty2
  exec openvt -c 2 -w sulogin

Alt+F2 should have a shell from which you can backup the mountall.log
after a couple of minutes of hang, so you can send it. (If the root
isn't writable, try mount -o rw,remount / but be sure to remount
readonly again (ro,remount) before rebooting)

Obviously you should boot without "splash" on the kernel command-line.

Scott
--
Scott James Remnant
<email address hidden>