modules-update causes immediate reboot

[ksaling]

I had to move my gentoo server (2.4.22) to a new cabinet, so I powered it down gracefully with `shutdown -h now`. No problems. When I booted it back up, it made it past grub and started booting the kernel as usual, but immediately rebooted at "Calculating module dependencies". It continued to loop like this until I powered it down.

I booted a Live CD and mounted up the file systems. I did a `choot` to the mounted root filesystem and examined the contents of /etc/moduels.conf and /etc/modules.autoload/* and /etc/modules.d/*. All looked normal.

I tried `etc-update` which reported "nothing left to do".

I tried `modules-update` and the server immediately rebooted again without warning.

I repeated the process above to boot off the Live CD again. This time I DELETED the /etc/modules.conf file and then executed `modules-update` again to recreate it. The server just locked up. It displayed nothing on the screen and it totally ignored all keyboard input (the CAPS-LOCK light wouldn't even illuminate).

What am I missing?

[ksaling]

Just thought of something that might have an impact on this. Between the last reboot and this current failure, the only thing I can remember changing/installing is vmware-workstation.

I did this with `emerge vmware-workstation`, then I ran vmware-config.pl and launched vmware. I installed a W2K guest OS using a VIRTUAL 4GB disk (not a partition on the physical disk).

Is it possbile that the guest OS install corrupted something on the physical disk?

My filesystems are:
/dev/hda1 /boot ext2 noauto,noatime 1 1
/dev/hda3 / reiserfs noatime 0 0
/dev/hda2 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hda5 /home reiserfs noatime 0 0

None of the filesystems are near capacity.