won't complete booting, not sure whether it's a hardware issue or not

[Stuart Morrow]

Hello, I'm installing Debian Hurd (for the first time) by the method in
which you untar the system files onto an ext partition in Linux and then
just boot into that, and it doesn't work for me. It uncompresses the
gnumach, loads it up, it begins detecting hardware, then hangs. It gets
as far as the line:
via-rhine.c:vl.16 7/22/2003 Written by Donald Becker <becker@scyld.com>
        http://www.scyld.com/network/via-rhine.html
and that's when it hangs. Is it a hardware problem?

Or, the other thing might be that I gave it the wrong root parameter (I
expect if you give it the wrong root parameter then it works OK up until
a certain point, then halts, which is what the symptom here it). If the
partition that its in in Linux is hdb1 then is the Hurd device node not
hd2s1? That's what I used.

Or if it's a hardware problem, I can type out more specific/relevant
messages from the boot text.

thanking you