One of those (few) days that GRUB sucks...

[kitepilot at kitepilot.com]

History:
I have a running machine,
I booted it up with KNOPPIX,
grabbed another hardware-wise fairly current "empty" machine,
booted it up with the same KNOPPIX,
rsync(ed) [-aH --super] one HD to the other,
ran GRUB,
root (hd0,0)
setup (hd0)
and I got a perfect clone running.
So far so good... 

I did this as I have done it 7368269 and-a-half times before for the last 
few years... 

Soooo...
Then I spawned another machine the same way and configured them to act as 
server and a client.  They have worked fine and they work. 

Then I need to duplicate this 2 machines.
Well, easy, I've done it millions of times, haven't I?. 

Not this time...
One machine hangs on:
GRUB Loading stage1.5(GARBAGE-GARBAGE-GARBAGE)
The other one just scrolls the screen endlessly...   :( 

I have tried every trick I know, I checked the partitions boot flag, I 
md5sum(ed) the files and they are not corrupted, GRUB doesn't give me 
otherwise any errors, and I am at the end of my rope... 

FWIW, I saw something like this before and I fixed it with a newer copy of 
GRUB, but being this an old RedHat in really OLD hardware, I'm getting me 
this time and OLDER copy of GRUB. 

Ideas?
Thanks!
Enrique