Hmm. Actually, I'm a bit worried about this line in the boot:

iput: device 03:44 inode 1034 still has aliases!

This is referring to hdb4 I think, and a possible filesystem corruption. It's possible that this is triggering a bug in the linux kernel and getting everything very upset. You *should* be able to hit ctrl-c repeatedly during bootup and get the empeg to a shell prompt - if you can, try doing "e2fsck /dev/hda4" and "e2fsck /dev/hdc4" (c4 is the secondary on a mk2's single bus).

As you've opened the unit under tfabis's guidance, you could try disconnecting the second drive (which is where it appears to have the problem) - this is the lefthand one when looking at the empeg with the display facing you. Leave the first one connected and see if it's happier - if so, it could well be ext2 has got itself incredibly confused. We've not seen this before, though, on any linux box!

Hugo