Symptom
During system startup time, the Mac OS X Server computer appears to stop responding ("hangs" or "freezes") when the progress bar reaches the message:
Starting Network Filesystem
The most common cause for this symptom is that the server has been configured to automatically connect to an NFS export that is on the server's own hard disk, a condition called a "loopback."
Solution
There are two ways to resolve an NFS loopback:
- Restore your network.nidb file from a good backup, or
- Delete or modify the mount(s) causing the issue.
Since the server will not start up normally, you can start up into single-user mode and use the "nicl" command tool.
Follow these steps to delete the mount(s) causing the issue:
1. When you turn on the computer, press and hold the Command and "s" keys to enter single-user mode.
2. Type: mount -uw /
3. Press Return.
4. Type: fsck -fy
5. Press Return, and wait for fsck to complete a file system check.
6. Type: nicl -raw -v /var/db/netinfo/network.nidb
7. Press Return.
8. Type: cd /mounts
9. Press Return.
10. Type: ls
11. Press Return. This should list the mounts.
12. Type: read
13. Press Return. You should see a list of the directory's contents with expanded information. Write down the name of any item that has: vfstype = nfs.
14. Type: cd name
Note: In place of "name," you would type the name of one of the names you wrote down in step 13.
15. Press Return.
16. Type: delete
Note: If you check the file path, you should not be in /mounts/, but rather in an appropriate subdirectory of mounts, such as /mounts/directoryname/.
17. Press Return.
18. Repeat steps 14-17 for any additional name(s) that you wrote down in step 13.
19. Type: quit
20. Press Return to exit nicl.
21. Type reboot
22. Press Return to restart the server.