Centos 7 cannot start up after restarting (stuck at Started GNOME Display Manager)

[quyetvk]

Hello all,

I have big issue with my server.
Recently, I could not SSH login to my server (CentOS 7.2) so I restarted my server.
After restarting, server cannot boot into GUI. Following logs are displayed:

[OK] Started Virtualization daemon.
[FAILED] Failed to start Dynamic System Tuning Daemon
(skips)
[OK] Starting Switch Root...
[OK] Started GNOME Display Manager.t Screen to Quit......Is.s.n.ange transactions.polling...

I do not know exactly what happened but I guess it may occur after I updating VirtualBox.
Just after rebooting server, updating VirtualBox impact something to CentOS.

Anyone can give me some suggestion to resolve above issue?
Thanks a lot!

[TrevorH]

First off you shouldn't be running 7.2 at all. It came out in late 2015 so is now almost 3 years old and has numerous high severity security vulnerabilities by now. You should be on 7.5 which is just a yum update away - something that should be run regularly, like once a week, to keep up to date.

It is unclear to me where VirtualBox comes into this? Is it running on the copy of CentOS that has the problem? Or is it hosting the copy of CentOS that has the problem?

Did you ever install proprietary video drivers from AMD or nvidia or even use the VirtualBox "guest additions" ? If you did then you need to reinstall those each and every time there is a kernel update.

[quyetvk]

Hi TrevorH,

Thank you very much for your reply.

First off you shouldn't be running 7.2 at all. It came out in late 2015 so is now almost 3 years old and has numerous high severity security vulnerabilities by now. You should be on 7.5 which is just a yum update away - something that should be run regularly, like once a week, to keep up to date.

I see. I should upgrade as you said. But, currently, my server cannot boot to do it. Even, I use Ctrl-F2 to enter login but login is loop (after I enter password, it turned to login again.

It is unclear to me where VirtualBox comes into this? Is it running on the copy of CentOS that has the problem? Or is it hosting the copy of CentOS that has the problem?

My servers (Centos 7.2) installed VirtualBox and I remember that I updated it some days ago so I guessed updating causing problem.

Did you ever install proprietary video drivers from AMD or nvidia or even use the VirtualBox "guest additions" ? If you did then you need to reinstall those each and every time there is a kernel update.

I did not ever install video drivers before and I am not sure which VirtualBox was installed.

Anyway, if you know any way to fix issue, please tell me.
Best regards

[slave]

On the initial boot menu prior to boot do you see a list of old kernels? What happens if you boot into one below the most recent

[quyetvk]

Hi Slave,

Thank you for your consider.

On the initial boot menu prior to boot do you see a list of old kernels? What happens if you boot into one below the most recent

Yes, I saw list of three items and I tried to boot into each one. But, situation is same.

Anyway, I had to re-install my server OS because I cannot find better solution.
But, it will be nice if anyone can solve this problem.

[Mike_Rochefort]

VirtualBox and VMWare require kmod rebuilding like Trevor said. Best thing to do is disable all service run by them (not sure about VBox, but vmware has two) so that the newly outdated module doesn't attempt to get loaded on boot.

Two things to try would be booting to multiuser mode or single user mode. To do so edit the Grub kernel launcher with the following options:

MU: Add systemd.unit=multi-user.target to the linux line.

SU: Change ro to rw init=/sysroot/bin/bash and when you're in the single user mode: chroot /sysroot/

If you get into either one of these, search systemctl for anything virtualbox related. The following might be enough:

systemctl disable vboxautostart-service

Cheers,
Mike