Try this, Disconnect all other drives in the system,cd-roms,floppies,other HDD's. now try to boot, If it still hangs then try different memory. If it still has an issue,move the drive to a known working computer and see if it will boot in that machine. Most often when I see this it is usually something on the ide bus either bad,or conflicting. And once I saw it happen on a gateway that the only way to get it to boot was to go into bios and select non plug and play os. came right up.
Rich