Applying 2.6.18-411.el5 may be why my system would not boot. It failed on boot after applying the update.
A couple of years ago I began having problems rebooting when an external USB backup drive was attached to my system. I searched for and tried several fixes without success. So, I took the external drive away and installed an internal drive for backups. I neglected, however, to remove the entry from the fstab (or from the templates-custom) that mounted the external USB drive. The boot process hung after spitting out it's error message about the external USB drive.
I was able to, after some research, boot into a command shell, remount the root drive as rw, modify the fstab and template-custom file, and reboot the system successfully. In the process it worked through the required reconfiguration and came all the way up.
Does anyone know if having a no longer needed fstab entry might be the cause of the reboot failing? I'm not sure this is a bug but may simply be a tightening up of the mount rules.
Thanks in advance,
Jim