I have two drives in my computer, one set up with DOS (including RAMdisk and loop and zipslack versions of Slackware) and a second with two ext2 linux partitions and two versions of Slackware (roughly 4 and 7)
I recently moved the drives to another board, where the linux drive no longer booted. When I moved it back to the first computer it would not boot either, or in a third board. Another drive with ext2 boots okay. (I am using loadlin and tried booting from two DOS drives and even a boot floppy).
Since the problem affected both drives at the same time I guessed it was hardware so I set up a new drive and copied the linux files to two new partitions.
The problem has followed to the new drive. Running e2fsck -b 8193 /dev/hdb2 (use alternate superblock) found some problems that may have been related to powering off after boot failed and fixed them but it still will not boot.

I get to the line IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP.
It hangs there instead of proceeding to:
TCP: Hash tables configured (ehash.......)

What else can I try to fix whatever is keeping these two partitions from booting?
I know it is not the boards because another linux ext2 drive works in all of them.
My last resort is to reinstall linux or copy it from my other computer, but that is the computer where the drive went bad in the first place.