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woody laptop hangs at various init scripts



I have an elderly Compaq Presario 1020 P120 laptop running Woody with icewm 
window manager, tetex, emacs, gnumeric, and not much else.  One day, out of 
the blue as far as I can tell, it hangs during the boot process at:

Initializing random number generator

so I boot from a rescue CD and put exit 0 at the top of /etc/init.d/urandom.  
Then it hangs at:

Configuring network interfaces:  SIOCSIFADDR: No such device
eth0: ERROR while getting interface flags: no such device
SIOCSINETMASK: No such device

So from the rescue CD I disable /etc/init.d/networking.  Then it hangs at:

Cleaning: /tmp /var/lock /var/run

Losing patience, I reformat and install the base system, since I have a full 
backup from when the machine was working.  The base system boots just fine, 
but then I restore from backup with:

mount /cdrom ; cd / ; tar -xvzf /cdrom/fullbackup.tar.gz

I fix lilo.conf and run lilo for the newer kernel, change fstab to stick with 
ext2 so that copying .journal from backups won't cause problems, reboot, and 
the system goes back to hanging at various startup scripts.  (Now at netenv, 
which I had disabled after the backup, then at Cleaning:  /tmp /var/lock 
/var/run again.)  Note that I don't use a display manager, I used to use 
'startx' to start icewm.

This seems very odd to me.  Any ideas what might be going on?  Or how to go 
about restoring just configuration from backup, preferably without losing the 
ability to boot?  Otherwise I will just start over from the base system, and 
maybe restore only a few important files like xf86Config and modules.conf.

The computer has a pcmcia network card, cdrom, floppy, sb16 sound, neomagic 
video driver.  Sleep and hibernate never worked properly, I did some 
remapping of the keyboard.  That's about all the configuration I can 
remember.



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