Using the original drive in a new location, it would hang attempting to fsck a non-existant / device.
The file "/etc/blkid.tab" appeared to have the old device information embedded in it. After removing this file, all was well.
Google has a few msgs that imply this "fsck caching bug" was fixed over a year ago, and that the second reboot should magically fix it.
Not in my case...I rebooted several times while checking grub, /etc/fstab and the device labels but the /etc/blkid.tag file did not get rebuilt until I rm'd the current (bogus) one.
This is just an FYI; the machine is now back to normal.
--- SW
