repairing corrupted kernel to boot

[<lists@elephants.org>]

My potato linux partiton won't boot - I assume it was damaged by
a series of power outages. I initially got a "crc checksum" error
upon booting.

/boot is on /dev/hda2 & / is /dev/hda5.
When I use the debian boot floppy ( "rescue root=/dev/hda5" )
I get the usual startup messages, 
   then:
VFS: mounted root ( ext2 filesystem ) readonly
Freeing unused kernel memory: 140K freed

after the above the computer just seems to freeze. No more display
messages, no response to the keyboard.

I can get a shell by adding "init=/bin/sash" to above boot options,
but I get #11 kills on any commands not built into the sash shell.

If I use the boot disk, then the root disk; I can use the install
menu's mount pre-initialized partions to mount my partitions. But
I get seg faults when I try to compile a kernel or run lilo (including
it's chroot option).

I'd like to get this system bootable again because I spent a good
deal of time tweaking & configuring to my hardware. Where should I
go from here?

jon