HELP - SYSTEM WON'T COMPLETELY BOOT UP

[ChrisHoover@safety-kleen.com]

HELP -

  I am having major problems all of a sudden.  I came back from a break
only to find that my linux box was completely locked up.  I tried to ping
it from my nt machine, but recieved no responce.  So, I went ahead and
powered down the machine.  When I powered it up, it started to boot up but
then had errors trying to switch run levels.  The screen states:

VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
Freeing unused kernel memory: 188k freed
INIT: version 2.78 booting
INIT: cannot execute "/etc/init.d/rcS"
INIT: Entering runlevel: 2
INIT: cannot execute "/etc/init.d/rc"
INIT: cannot execute "/bin/sh"

/etc/init.d/rcS and rc are there.

When I logged in to the machine and do a df I every mount point has this:
Filesystem     1K-blocks used Available  Use%      Mounted on
<device>  672664         115244    523252          18%  <mountpoint>

What is going on, and how do I fix it.

The machineis running kernel 2.4.5, but when I booted to the original 2.2.x
kernel, I got the same messages.

Thanks,