Init hanging.... again.

[yan]

OK, I probably broke something but I'll be d*mned if I know what....

I had to move my development system from one box to another.  Somewhere 
in the move I cp'd the root fs for my embedded box, and screwed up.  All 
the symlinks were followed and I had a zillion copies of busybox on the 
root fs.

No sweat, I thought - just rebuild busybox, reinstall, and we're done.  
I've done it a bunch of times with no problem....

Fast forward a few hours (actually most of the day).

The system hangs consistently at "Freeing init memory".  Once (only 
once) was I able to get it to boot, and then on reboot *with no changes* 
it hung again.

I've

1) rebuilt busybox from my patched dev version to 1.2.1
2) rebuilt the kernel to make sure I was using the correct toolchain.
3) built a whole new rootfs with only the barest minimum needed to boot.

The sytem will boot if I tell it 'init=/bin/sh' or even 
init=/etc/init.d/rcS'.

My inittab only containts two lines:

::sysinit:/etc/init.d/rcS
ttyAM1::askfirst:/bin/sh

The system boots via nfs; I can ping it right up until it stops with the 
'Freeing init memory' message; then I get a 'destination host unreachable'.

Can anyone shed some light on this?

Please?

--Yan