Bootup freezes at "Starting up..."

[Michael Peek]

Hi gurus,

First of all, I'm attempting something screwy, so a little backstory is 
probably important.  I have some servers with large (>16TB) RAIDS.  
Disgruntled with JFS and XFS, I decided to try Ext4.  The servers are 
running 8.10 amd64 server (linux-image-2.6.27-11-server) and fully up to 
date.  So I downloaded the source packages for e2fsprogs-1.41.4, 
linux-2.6.28-11, and wireless-crda-1.7 from the Jaunty tree and compiled 
them.

I have two servers:

Server #1:
SuperMicro X7DWE
2 x Intel Xeon E5420 2.5GHz CPUs
8GB RAM
Adaptec RAID 51645


Server #2:
Same as server #1, except with two Adaptec RAID 51645 cards

On server #1:
+ New kernel
+ wireless-cdra
+ e2fsprogs
+ reboot
= Flawless victory!

Formatted the RAID ext4 and it's running like a top.

So I repeated this process on server #2, but when I rebooted, I was 
greeted with:

Boot from (hd0,0) ext3 c7447ceb-e203-418b-9c2b-d76d8d89f99e
Starting up...

And then the server hangs.  And by hang, I mean it stayed at that point 
for an hour and never booted up.

So I rebooted into the old kernel and edited /boot/grub/menu.lst.  I 
removed "quiet" and "splash" from the kernel parameters list for the 
2.6.28 kernel and rebooted.  The bootup process hangs at:

[    0.392901] CPU0: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5420 W 2.50GHz stepping 
0...<off screen>
[    0.400000] Booting processor 1 APIC 0x4 ip 0x6000


The next thing I tried was noacpi and noapic, no good.  Thinking that I 
had it wrong, I tried acpi=off and apci=off.  No good.

As a last resort, I turned ACPI off in BIOS.  No good.

[    0.013284] Setting APIC routing to flat
[    0.013344] CPU0: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5420 @ 2.50GHz 
stepping...<off screen>
[    0.130848] Booting processor 1 APIC 0x4 ip 0x6000
<And... freeze!>

I am now officially desperate.  Does anyone have any ideas what to do next?

Thanks for any help you can offer,

Michael