I recently installed new hard drive and cloned old hard drive software onto it. The bootloader installs either linux or other operating system. Ever since the cloning, boot hangs. Words in the thread title are the last to appear before everything grinds to a halt. Just before the kernal panic message appears, "Initrd finished" is last line. Will have to try booting again to find more info before this.

You'll need to post the lines before the last one. "Attempted to kill init" is a catchall, the real reason is before it.

The boot loader's /boot/grub/menu.lst file or /etc/fstab may use the hardware id to reference the partitions. You will need to fix these entries.
These are entries that look like ata-TOSHIBA_MK2049GSY_48CYT01OT-part1. The kernel creates the /dev/disk/by-id entries dynamically when you boot and they will be different with a new drive.

Will do it now.

Jschiwal, how do I correct the entry in the boot process? And can I find the info I need on the side of the hard drive?

Creating Root Device
Trying to resume from /dev/hda6
Unable to access resume device (/dev/hda6)
echo: cannot open /proc/suspend2/do_resume for write: 2
Mounting root filesystem /dev/root
Mount: error 6 mounting ext flags defaults
well, retrying without the option flags
input AT Translated Set 2 keyboard as/class/input/input@
mount: error 6 mounting ext 3
well, retrying read-only without any flag
mount: error 6 mounting ext3
Switching to new root
ERROR opening /dev/console!!!!:2
unmounting old /proc
unmounting old /sys
switchroot: mount failed: 22
Initrd finished
Kernel panic-not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

Ok, error 6 mounting ext3 is the relevant error here. The kernel can't mount your root filesystem. This could be for a number of reasons.

Boot from a live CD, collect the output of "fdisk -l". fsck your Linux partitions and make sure this comes back clean. Mount them and collect your etc/fstab (from the disk, not the live CD's) and boot/grub/grub.conf and post them there. Also collect the UUIDs of your Linux partitions with "blkid /dev/sdaX" replacing sdaX with the partition names appropriate for your setup. If jschiwal is right, you have mismatched UUIDs in your fstab and on the new disk.

The kernel running on a live distro (or rescue mode in install disk) will create symbolic links in /dev/disk/by-id/. List them with "ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/". They will point to the regular devices such as /dev/sda1, etc. Write down what they are. There are also /dev/disk/by-uuid/ links as will which point to the same devices. The UUID numbers are for the filesystems on the partitions. The UUID numbers may be used in /etc/fstab. /boot/grub/menu.lst will most likely use IDs instead.

Posting your current menu.lst file and the current fstab file may help as well.