Why do most answers here assume that all data needs to be deleted, reformatted, and then restart Hadoop?
How do we know namenode is not progressing, but taking lots of time.
It will do this when there is a large amount of data in HDFS.
Check progress in logs before assuming anything is hung or stuck.
$ [kadmin@hadoop-node-0 logs]$ tail hadoop-kadmin-namenode-hadoop-node-0.log
...
016-05-13 18:16:44,405 INFO org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.server.namenode.FSEditLogLoader: replaying edit log: 117/141 transactions completed. (83%)
2016-05-13 18:16:56,968 INFO org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.server.namenode.FSEditLogLoader: replaying edit log: 121/141 transactions completed. (86%)
2016-05-13 18:17:06,122 INFO org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.server.namenode.FSEditLogLoader: replaying edit log: 122/141 transactions completed. (87%)
2016-05-13 18:17:38,321 INFO org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.server.namenode.FSEditLogLoader: replaying edit log: 123/141 transactions completed. (87%)
2016-05-13 18:17:56,562 INFO org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.server.namenode.FSEditLogLoader: replaying edit log: 124/141 transactions completed. (88%)
2016-05-13 18:17:57,690 INFO org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.server.namenode.FSEditLogLoader: replaying edit log: 127/141 transactions completed. (90%)
This was after nearly an hour of waiting on a particular system.
It is still progressing each time I look at it.
Have patience with Hadoop when bringing up the system and check logs before assuming something is hung or not progressing.