I ran into an issue this week where a work server stopped booting after a linux kernel patch (3.10.0-xxxx.83.xxxx) was deployed.

The server would always get ‘stuck’ trying to load drivers for an Avocent USB Keyboard/Mouse. These seemed to be the Dell iDRAC drivers, because the virtual console lacked keyboard/mouse inputs.

If the old kernel (3.10.0-1160.80.xxxx) was selected during boot, the OS loaded properly. I’m not a Unix expert, so I looped in one of my colleagues.

He explained that the kernel was trying to use old (or corrupted) drivers from the initrd (initial ram disk) scheme. These drivers can be rebuilt by running yum install kernel.
After running the command, I rebooted the server which booted properly.

Dell seems to have several similar KBs on this issue, like this one about Drivers available in OEMDRV drive are not installed during the operating system installation