[CentOS] Very early PANIC during boot

[John R Pierce]

Alfred von Campe wrote:
> On a vaguely related note, I also have pondered the following in the 
> past; if you observe a system booting, you'll see all the "[OK]" and 
> "[FAILED]" messages.  Is there a log somewhere where you can check 
> later on which services were started and which passed or failed?

the `dmesg` command will display the kernel message buffer, which 
includes messages prior to syslogd starting up.   also look in 
/var/log/messages

as dmesg can eventually overflow with junk (iptables logging messages, 
for instance), I've been known to stuff a command like

    dmesg > /var/log/dmesg.boot

into /etc/rc.d/rc.local  just to keep a copy of the state of dmesg right 
after boot for later reference.