RHEL system fails to boot (or reboots continuously) and the following error is printed on the console " telinit did not receive a reply"

Issue

Server fails to boot and the following message is seen on the console

chown invalid user `root:root`
Enabling /etc/fstab swaps
telinit: Did not receive a reply. Possible cause include: the remote application did not send a reply the message bu security policy blocked the reply the reply timeout expired or the network connection was broken
init: rcS post-stop process(847) terminated with status 1