Hung in VirtualBox. Why?

[kitepilot at kitepilot.com]

Hello collective intelligence (REALLY? :) 

This is the short story:
This has worked before.  I've done it 9568705738563 times in real machines 
and VMWare machines.  First time in VBox though... 

I got a computer and rsync(ed) everything to a filesystem in a VBox machine.
GRUB(ed) it without problems as I've done countless times.
Partitions match, and fstab matches, but we'll never get there anyway... 

The VBox machine, boots, GRUBs, and hangs on: 

Uncompressing Linux... OK, booting the kernel. 

My first take is an initrd problem, but why? 

More details:
I created the filesystem with mke2fs in Kubuntu 8.10, while the machine I am 
copying from is a 2.6.9 kernel Red Hat (I'm no familiar with Red Hat) and 
E2fsprogs is 7 minors older (.35 to .41)
Any ideas?
I'm lost...   :(
Thanks!
Enrique A. Troconis