My Debian System is toast

Okay, so I had a PIII system that was running Debian etch and everything was good. All it was doing was running Apache2, PHP5, and Postgres. It had been running fine for months. However, it was a PIII and I happened to come across a P4 2Ghz IBM that had failed with a bad hard drive. So I don't have another hard drive other than the one in my system, so I decide that I can migrate my server quite simply by moving the PIII's hard disk to the newer machine. I read a little online and everyone seems to think that there's no issues in relation to do this for Linux systems (not windows apparently).

So I do it. At first there's no network, but that's pretty easy, I just had to detect what interface the new network card was under and change the network/interfaces. I even find the udev and comment out the original hardware and make my interface card go back to eth0.

Now I'm really having problems, every few days I can no longer write to the database with new information through my PHP5 scripts. I do some searching and realize I should disable ssl for postgres because it has a key generated off my old hardware (and I don't use it). When I try to "reboot" or "poweroff" it sends out the message it is shutting down, but it doesn't. Everything slows down and "top" no longer able to work.

I have no idea what to do, I dpkg -reconfigure initscripts and I still can't even reboot! I don't know what I should do aside from a clean install, which seems kind of extreme, I don't want to have to reconfigure everything (especially postgres).

[edit]
Sorry, to add -> Over and SSH session, I run top and it does nothing, no errors or anything. I can stop the job and do something else, but top will not load.