Centos 6 stuck at loading splash screen after successful installation

Question

I'm trying to dual-boot CentOS with Windows 7.

My current disk layout are as follow:-

/dev/sda1 - Windows 7
/dev/sda3 - NTFS partition

I created a standard partition for /boot and that was assigned as /dev/sda2.

When I create LVM Physical Volume, it automatically creates an Extended Partition (/dev/sda4) and the LVM Physical Volume (/dev/sda5) was created under the Extended Partition.

I then created 2 volume group for / and swap.

Upon complete installation, I'm unable to login to Centos at all. It is stuck at the loading splash screen.

Does this have anything to do with the disk layout? If so, how can I fix this?

EDITED

Instead of dual-booting it, I installed it as a VM on my Windows Machine. I started off with a blank disk layout, create /boot partition followed by the LVM Physical Volume. It installed fine and was able to boot up normally. I presume the issue was due to the LVM Physical Volume sitting in the Extended Partition that ruined the boot-up. Could be wrong through. Should I mount the extended partition first or something?

Answer 1

A couple of things you can try. For starters I'd try and boot a Live Distro or use the Rescue Disc facility that comes with CentOS to make sure you can mount your /boot and / partitions.

Assuming they're mountable I'd take a look at your /boot/grub/menu.lst file and make sure that it's referencing the correct HDD partitions for your / partition.

For example

title CentOS (2.6.32-220.el6.i686)
        root (hd0,1)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.32-220.el6.i686 ro root=/dev/mapper/vg_centos62-lv_root rd_NO_LUKS LANG=en_US.UTF-8 rd_LVM_LV=vg_centos62/
lv_swap rd_LVM_LV=vg_centos62/lv_root rd_NO_MD quiet SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 rhgb 
crashkernel=auto  KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=us rd_NO_DM
        initrd /initramfs-2.6.32-220.el6.i686.img

Make sure that the root ... line in your menu.lst file is referencing the correct partition.

This Techotopia Dual Boot Howto may be helpful as well.

Extended Partitions

If you take a look at this CentOS forum post they show a fairly involved setup with multiple OSes all on a single HDD. The OP at the bottom seems to be having the same conclusion you are, mainly:

However, I CAN manually chain Windows Vista (hd1, 0) and Solaris x/86 (hd0, 3), which makes me wonder: Is it something about the two CentOSes being in LVMs that I am not accounting for in my grub records? As it stands, I will manually have to swap the boot order from the BIOS if I want to go between CentOS5 and CentOS6...