mount -f hangs rc.sysinit

[Hal Burgiss <hburgiss bellsouth net>]

Upon rebooting fully updated 6.1 with 2.2.14 kernel, init hangs during
rc.sysinit. After much digging and swearing, I find that it hangs at
any reference to 'mount -f'. The 'mount -n' actions go without
failure. mtab is created (empty) and permissions, attributes, etc
appear all to be normal. I've run e2fsck till I'm blue in the face.
The first run showed a lot of errors, but none thereafter (using
various flags). /dev/hd* all look good. I happen to have the root fs
mirrored on a different partition and can get in that way. I have run
'diff' against /bin, /lib, and /sbin and they would all appear to be
100% identical. I have no trouble mounting the screwy partition when I
boot from my backup root partition. Cannot find anything that looks
even remotely unusual. I have copied 'mount' from the good one to the
bad and ugly one. I can get in only with 'init=/bin/sh' to the
original /, but have all kinds of problems with mount there too.
Trying to shutdown in that scenario, umount acts real screwy and
usually hangs.

WTF is going on? Any ideas at all would be greatly appreciated.

-- 
Hal B
hburgiss bellsouth net
--
            Linux helps those who help themselves