Not sure I completely understand. Does the logs/debug.log report any progress?
Was Neo4j abnormally stopped, i.e. a kill -9 <Neo4j linux processID>?
When one stops Neo4j in a normal fashion, i.e. bin/neo4j stop, then right before the process exits we perform a checkpoint, which flushes any data from the pagecache to graph.db/neostore* files.
If you kill -9 then the checkpoint will not occur and as such on restart a recovery process will be initiated
