I've tried booting in both failsafe and expert modes, but both hang.

In the expert mode, it gets to a point where it says "Interactive Configuration finished. Everthing else should be fine for now", then it proceeds to: "Scanning for Harddisk partitions and creating /etc/fstab... Done" where it hangs.

So what happens after /etc/fstab is created?

Any idea on how to troubleshoot further on this?