system fails to boot after freeze after freeing unused kernal memory

Hello, I'm having a little emergency with my redhat linux box (v8).
I tried to reboot from the commandline: reboot
The box wouldn't reboot so I thought to shut it down: halt
That didn't work either, so I gave her the old restart button. Now when I try to reboot the system it gets as far as: freeing unused kernal memory

and stops, I mean stops completely. Nothing after. I can type and there are letters appearing on the screen. I can press enter until everything has scrolled up off the screen. ^X does nothing as does ^C or ^D.

I restarted the system with the disks in recovery mode. Swell! I thought, I'll just make everything I need into a tarball and ftp it to another server so I can jump ship. I can't send a thing because I don't know how to get networking up without actually booting to the disk based operating system.

I'm doomed if I lose all this stuff, well mabye not doomed but very, very sad. Will someone help me please?

Quinn

You should be able to reinstall without reformatting.

I did, twice. Then I finally gave up and reformatted. Only Murphy knows what happend to that box. Just teaches me a lesson to not get lazy on backups :-).

Thanks for your input anyhow.

Quinn.