Comment 1 for bug 270371

Ok, so it was the problem from the link, rebooting from a live cd for Intrepid (Ubunty 8.10) Alpha 5 which has kernel 2.6.27 fixed it.
Incase your box hangs or goes in an infinite loop after a crash, this is one of the solutions.

It printed some error messages such as bad orphan node, did you run e2fsck, n_inode = 1 , etc and then rebooting off the installed Ubuntu worked.

Should mention, this is bad. Users should not have to go through kernel patches, logs and try out alpha OSes to boot up from a crash.

Amit