Certification Objective 16.03: Required RHCE Troubleshooting Skills

At some point in your career as a Red Hat Enterprise Linux administrator, maybe even on the Red Hat exams, you’re going to be faced with a system that will not boot. It will be up to you to determine the cause of the problem and implement a fix. Sometimes, the problem may be due to hardware failure: the system in question has a bad power supply or has experienced a hard disk crash.

Quite often, however, the failure of a system to boot can be traced back to the actions of a user: you, the system administrator! When you are editing certain system configuration files, typographical errors can render your system unbootable.