Hangup on "Unmounting file systems"

When I shut down my OpenSUSE 11.1 system, it hangs up on the message “Unmounting file systems” and goes no further. Only a hard reset clears the condition. The last few lines of /var/log/messages are:


Apr 12 01:01:31 suillus2 nmbd[3610]:   Got SIGTERM: going down...
Apr 12 01:01:32 suillus2 rpcbind: rpcbind terminating on signal. Restart with "rpcbind -w"
Apr 12 01:01:32 suillus2 kernel: Kernel logging (proc) stopped.
Apr 12 01:01:32 suillus2 kernel: Kernel log daemon terminating.
Apr 12 01:01:32 suillus2 syslog-ng[2528]: Termination requested via signal, terminating;
Apr 12 01:01:32 suillus2 syslog-ng[2528]: syslog-ng shutting down; version='2.0.9'

These lines don’t seem to provide any indication of the problem, whatever it is.

pwabrahams wrote:
>
> These lines don’t seem to provide any indication of the problem,
> whatever it is.

They won’t as the system logger is shut down quite early in the process.

After your system boots, look at the output of dmesg to see if there are any
kernel oops messages printed. That is one situation that prevents unmounting the
disks.

Are you running any out-of-kernel drivers? A bug in one of those could be the cause.

Rather than looking at the contents of /var/log/messages, you should press the
escape key to get rid of the splash screen when shutting down and view the
console messages. You may see the problem there.

Is this during a complete shutdown or reboot? I had umount error messages during only reboot until someone recommended I uninstall pulse audio.

No oops messages.

Are you running any out-of-kernel drivers? A bug in one of those could be the cause.

There are lots of kernel modules being loaded, but I thought that’s the normal situation. I don’t have any unofficial ones that I’m aware of.

Rather than looking at the contents of /var/log/messages, you should press the
escape key to get rid of the splash screen when shutting down and view the
console messages. You may see the problem there.

I already had done that, and there weren’t any revealing messages. Everything looked fine up to and including the unmounting message.

I’m running Virtual Box, which does use PulseAudio, I believe. And I don’t always get the unmounting hangup. It might be correlated with whether I’m actually running a VirtualBox session.

Another user suggested this to me when I posted my original problem with umount:

  1. Backup /etc/init.d/boot.localfs
  2. Edit /etc/init.d/boot.localfs
  3. Find ‘umount’ command, and add option -l (lazy unmount) to each of it.
    it will solve the problem.

It might be worth a shot.