Help!

I've been happily running MacBSD on my SE/30 (MacOS system 7.5.3) for 
about five weeks. I've had problems, but nothing fatal. For the most 
part, I've been happily working away. I'm also a raw beginner, so please 
bear with me.

A couple of days ago, out of the blue my machine began hanging just as it 
was finishing up the boot process into MacBSD. It generally stops at the 
line I put in when I installed X: "Adding X runtime libraries ... " etc. 
I can type, but nothing happens.

I thought, "Hmmm. Maybe the kernel got corrupted. I'll re-install it." No 
change.

Is it possible that something in the file system got messed up? I didn't 
do anything unusual in BSD.

Is it possible that new control panels in the MacOS could be messing me 
up? I just installed a Silverlining Lite driver for my Syquest, but 
that's it, really.

MacBSD is installed on my internal harddrive, which is a Quant* (Quantus? 
Quantum?).

I do have one other point of note: My machine has had some trouble lately 
booting into the MacOS -- it'll sometimes hang early in the process, 
sometimes give me the dead-Mac face. Most of the time it works, but it's 
become quite unpredictable. This began happening after I started using 
"shutdown -r/-h now" and "reboot" from BSD, so it seems that my machine 
doesn't like those commands.

Anyway, before I exterpate MacBSD and start over with the whole 
installation process, does anyone have any ideas as to why this might be 
happening?

Thanks.

Shawn