I recently had a kernel bug that caused a process to hang in D (disc wait) status. I decided to do a reboot, but thought I'd try upgrading the kernel before I did that. The kernel upgrade also got stuck in "D" while trying to do a depmod, so I finally did a reboot, and had to hard power down.

During the reboot, it would get to where it would say "Begin: Running /scripts/init-bottom", and hang there. I searched around and didn't find much, so I figured I'd document the solution here.

I booted into rescue mode (off the initial media, I wasn't able to boot with "init=/bin/sh"), and then got a shell in the root file-system. I did a "dpkg --configure -a", and then rebooted and that solved the problem.

I found this issue by trying to run "apt-get update" in the rescue environment and it helpfully told me that it had been interrupted and I needed to run the above command. :-)

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