lots of daemons dead but pid file exists

[Zarnick Maelstorm]

On Wed, 18 Jul 2007 20:48:18 -0700, 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:
> 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

Kumar, take a look at /proc, this is were most of the pid files are
stored. The programs usually create a pid file there when they start, and
when they shutdown, they remove it. If the server was not properly
shutted down, the pid files were not removed, and when you try to start
the program again, it thinks it's still running.
So try cleaning manually the pid files on /proc (sometimes /var/proc),
and see if it works fine.

Mateus