reboot cycle, no log messages

[Joel Rees]

Just before it reboots, it gives me messages about old ext3  
partitions that have problems mounting.

History:

this machine has seen upgrades and re-installs from FC2 or so. Most  
recently, I had succeeded in doing an upgrade from F7 to F9 using a  
netinstall CD and some patient cleaning up, then an uneventful  
upgrade to F10.

Then I seriously botched a CD-less upgrade via the command-line  
upgrade tool because my /var/log partition only had 2G and I needed  
more than that for the packages. (Used lvm to extend /var/log to 5 G  
and then it did something really strange that I don't quite recall  
and left me with a system partially upgraded, trying to find th wrong  
kernel. And I didn't want to mess with that, so I cleared an old 40G  
partition I wasn't really using and wiped the botched boot partition,  
leaving the old stuff behind in the lvm-managed partition it had been  
in.

Installed F12, and it booted fine. Then I added some old partitions  
I'd been using for backup to /etc/fstab, and added the old lvm  
partition, as well, for laughs. At that point, it would start boot  
cycling, repeating 2 to 7 or more times before something settled down  
and it would boot.

This is what I captured with a digital camera when it cycled:

--------------------------------
/dev/mapper/fc7-7[various]: clean [long list of partitions from the  
old system]
/dev/mapper/fc7-7varwww: clean, 644/516896 files, 27268/516896 blocks
                                                                         
   [failed]

*** An error occured during the file system check,
*** Dropping you to a shell; the system will reboot
*** when you leave the shell.
*** Warning -- SELinux is active
*** Disabling security enforcement for system recovery.
*** Run 'setenforce 1' to reenable.
sulogin: error while loading shared libraries: libfreebl3.so: cannot  
open shared
  object file: No such file or directory
Unmounting file system
Automatic reboot in progress.
-------------------------------

After it successfully booted, I would be able to mount and access the  
old /var/www partition with no problem.

I find this message in the forum:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=230419

but my /var/log/messages contains no EXT4-fs error messages.

Setting the passno entry in /etc/fstab to 0 or commenting out the  
entry just pushes the error message back. When a large partition at / 
dev/sdb4, which I use for backup, is the final partition checked in / 
etc/fstab, it gives me

------------------------------
fsck.ext3: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short  
read while trying to open /dev/sdb4
Could this be a zero-length partition?
------------------------------

and then the messages about libfreebl3.so and the automatic reboot.

yum provides libfreebl3.so tells me that nss-softokn-freebl is  
installed. Trying an erase to re-install it tells me that most of the  
OS and most of the apps seem to be dependent on it, one way or  
another. Hmm.

This looks like I need to file a bug or two. Anyone know what's  
happening here?

Joel Rees