Xbian hangs during boot saying "Switching root"

[Rilhas]

Hi,

I've successfully installed XBian, and it ras perfectly. Then, after a few days, it didn't boot after a restart, and got stuck saying "Moving root", and then "Switching root" (HDMI output).

I found out that pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL would terminate whatever it was doing and caused a reboot.

The first line that shows after rebooting says that I can press and hold SHIFT to get a shell, but doing that changes nothing. It could be that my TV is too slow restoring the picture after the reboot (it takes a few seconds with "no input detected" until it detects the Pi's output), so I tried pressing SHIFT at various times during boot but without success.

I flashed the SD card with a new image, but it didn't boot, got stuck in the same situation. I continued trying CTRL+ALT+DEL again a few times to see if I could make something new happen while rebooting.

I then remembered it could be my external USB disk causing the problem, as the periodic disk checks sometimes take days to complete and I hadn't disabled that in the USB disk yet (although only a few days had passed, not the typical 25 days). I removed the disk altogether, but no luck.

I removed every USB peripheral, including keyboard, but nothing changed. Then I put back the USB keyboard and, on one of the CTRL+ALT+DEL attempts, the sequence resulted in XBMC starting instead of rebooting, and everything seemed fine after that.

The first thing I did was change the fstab file to disable automatic disk checks, by replacing the final "1" with a "0".

Then I removed the splash, set it not to be quiet, and included "loglevel" (although I'm not sure anything changed with this last option).

I disabled overclocking (I always do).

I have no reason to suspect the hardware, as inserting a new card works perfectly. Also, the card I'm trying to boot from on another Pi results in exactly the same behaviour.

Anyway, everything worked just fine after that for a few days, I rebooted many times, I have the USB disk had everything else connected to it as usual, and it always moved past the "Switching root" line.

Today, after a normal reboot, there it is again: stuck "switching root". Removing the USB external disk didn't solve anything, and it has been stuck there for well over an hour now.

Any ideas on what I should do to recover from this? And how to make it not happen again?

Thanks!