In either case, it would be interesting to know if ghost will load for you or not when using the -noide switch.
Then right out in left field, you could also try -noscsi -no1394 -nousb, just in case there is some kind of bizzare device hang there.
Separately, it might be worthwhile to compare the bios revisions of the known good and bad machines. Additionally, in any case, I'd suggest trying a bios upgrade first of all. After this I'd also suggest trying earlier bios revisions as well, in case you are experiencing a weird issue introduced in later revisions.
I'm not sure which network driver you are using. If you are using the universal driver, consider recreating the boot environment using the "universal driver with irqcfg". This causes a utliity to run prior to the driver load which checks for and attempts to resolve irq conflicts. The check stage blips past quickly, so you'll need to watch carefully to see if it reports anything.
It certainly is strange that you are experiencing this with some but not all of your machines of the same model. It might be interesting to remove some of the HDD's and see if the HDD's are using a different firmware revision. In either case, perhaps a good test would be to swap HDD's between a known good and known problem machine, and see if there is any change in behaviour for either machine. At least this particular test will rule out hdd differences and/or some kind of very bizzare and unheard of bios/hdd interaction issue.
Message Edited by Xan Todd on 07-04-200712:58 PM