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

Solution Verified - Updated -

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

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor

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