HELP! can't boot--Permission denied

["pierre" <pierre@ans.com.au>]

Hello
 My 2.2 box was working fine until yesterday.
Now when i start it up,via hd and/or boot floppy, it loads lilo, goes 
through some of its startup sequence, detects the hard drives,and 
then it hangs with about 15 lines of Permission denied. 

/etc/init.d/rcS: /bin/grep: Permission denied
/etc/init.d/rcS: /dev/null: Permission denied
blah
blah
blah
blah
blah
blah
blah
blah
blah
/etc/init.d/rcS: /bin/run-parts: Permission denied

It does not go any further. I can only think of
2 things i did recently:

1)Yesterday I reformatted (with linux cfdisk) the mswindows 
partition of my drive (hda1) to make more room for linux as i no 
longer need windows.

2)I also set up a 2nd pc with debian and exported its entire 
filesystem (via nfs) to the 2.2 box .

Does anybody know what happened and how i can get back into
my pc?
Thanks