CentOS hangs on boot

[Tom Burke]

OK, I realize this might not be the right place to ask, but maybe someone
will have some pity on me, and at least point me to the right place...

So...

My RH server went tango uniform the other day.  After nearly 15 years of
pretty solid performance, some piece of hardware gave up the ghost.

I wanted to retrieve some files off the disk that hadn't yet been backed
up, so...

I first tried installing CentOS on the old server (which sorta seemed to
still work, just no ethx), and it wouldn't do it.  Finally the machine
pretty much quit working altogether.  D'oh.  RIP.

 I pulled back an older WinXP machine, installed the data disk (ext2), and
used a Fedora live CD to gain access to the disk.  I transferred a couple
of directories over to the windows partition, but a couple didn't have
permissions that would let me collect them up, as well.

"That stinks," I politley commented to myself, "but that's not a problem, I
have CentOS 5.6 install disks right here!"

So, I installed CentOS to the WinXP box, installing it all on the old data
disk (deleting one of the partitions that I had already recovered, and
creating a new swap partition)

Grub was installed, with windows being the primary boot.

Reboot the machine.
Stop the boot into windows.
Boot into linux

Boot hangs.

Multiple reboots, it doesn't always hang in the same spot, but it's during
the initial startup when it's firing up services.

Sometimes it hangs on ssh key generation, sometimes before.

I thunk it might be a memory problem, so I used the memory test utility on
the fedora live cd to test.  Memory seems to be OK.

When running WinXP, there's never a problem.

Hardware:
Pentium 5 3GHz
2GB Memory
2x ide drives
3com wireless ethernet card
integrated ethernet (not connected, but similar things occur when it is
connected - I have not tried removing the wireless nic)

Clues?