Good morning. Checking indicates this bug is not yet known.

If you by chance (in our case it appeared to involve an unclean NFS
shutdown or whatever) end up with /etc/mtab, mtab~ and mtab~~, your system
will hang directly after remounting / rw. No error message will be given,
it will just hang and loop.

(This is mount trying to create its lockfile for mtab and failing)

How to reproduce easily:
touch /etc/mtab /etc/mtab~ /etc/mtab~~
sync ; shutdown -f (or flip the reset button;)

Quite an annoying error to track down, since it follows even a cp -a of the
root fs to a new partition (one of the first suspects of a box hanging
after remounting / rw is a ext2 error of some sort...)

initscripts should do something about that (remove mtab*), and mount should
_probably_ complain about it instead of silently looping forever.