lots of daemons dead but pid file exists

[James McDonald]

kumarlimbu wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> We recently had problem with our linux server and had to (hard) restart it.
> During the restart we found that a lots of services were not able to start
> properly like ssh, apache, mysql, xfs etc. which caused the machine not
> being able to go to runlevel 5 (no GUI). So we switched to runlevel 3. We
> found that when we looked at the status for the usual services we found the
> following error:
> <service> dead but pid file exists
>
> What could cause an error like this.
>
> I searched through the forums and found that most of the problem with
> xserver starting properly has to do with DISK full etc. but nothing was
> quite similar to what we had.
>
> If there are anymore information that you guys need to help me, please let
> me know.
>
>
> Thank You,
> Kumar
>   
What version of linux is this?
Do you have your /var/run directory on a different partition? Has your 
partition somehow been mounted read only?
Can you run touch /var/run/test.pid and create a file?
What is the output df -h?