title: Cassandra gets stuck on Initializing IndexInfo
body: <p>I'm using Cassandra on a CentOS machine. After it failed some time ago, I restarted it via
  <code>sudo service cassandra restart</code>
  and started getting Connection refused error all over the place - I couldn't even run <code>nodetool status</code> without running into that issue.</p>
  
  <p>After some digging and subsequent restarts, I noticed in the <code>debug.log</code> that the startup sequence gets stuck at the following:</p>
  
  <p><code>INFO  [main] 2018-04-03 09:40:15,156 ColumnFamilyStore.java:389 - Initializing system.IndexInfo
  INFO  [SSTableBatchOpen:1] 2018-04-03 09:40:15,851 BufferPool.java:226 - Global buffer pool is enabled, when pool is exahusted (max is 512 mb) it will allocate on heap
  DEBUG [SSTableBatchOpen:1] 2018-04-03 09:40:15,873 SSTableReader.java:479 - Opening &lt;path&gt;/IndexInfo-9f5c6374d48532299a0a5094af9ad1e3/mc-300-big (58 bytes)
  DEBUG [SSTableBatchOpen:2] 2018-04-03 09:40:15,873 SSTableReader.java:479 - Opening &lt;path&gt;3/system/IndexInfo-9f5c6374d48532299a0a5094af9ad1e3/mc-301-big (59 bytes)
  DEBUG [SSTableBatchOpen:3] 2018-04-03 09:40:15,873 SSTableReader.java:479 - Opening &lt;path&gt;/IndexInfo-9f5c6374d48532299a0a5094af9ad1e3/mc-299-big (302 bytes)</code></p>
  
  <p>Opening these files should take about a second - it's stuck on it for ages (as in, it never moved beyond this point). I suspect that some of the files involved must be corrupted (although I'm surprised the Java doesn't catch some sort of an exception here).</p>
  
  <p>What should I do? If I delete these folders, would that result in me losing data? What other diagnostics can I run to establish the source of the problem? For the record, any sort of <code>nodetool</code> command exits with a "Connection Refused" error.</p>
  
  <p>Version numbers:
  Cassandra: 3.0.9
  Java: 1.8.0_162
  CentOS: 6.9</p>
  
  <p>Thanks for help!</p>