[CentOS] bizarre problem with performance

Wed Sep 17 21:41:49 UTC 2014
Dan Hyatt <dhyatt at dsgmail.wustl.edu>

Hi,
I am running centos6-5 on dell620 blades.
mirrored local root drives
several (including home) mounted filesystems.

The other blades are working fine.
Top indicates the server is running 1% cpu, and very little memory (idleing)
There is no error in the messages file
There is no amber lights on the server.

When I log into my server it is fine, on my remote mounted home directory.
When I cd to root (local disk) and I type ls it just hangs.

I ran top, the system is basically idle
I ran ifconfig and everything looks good.
when I ran df -h it hangs

when I run ls  on my home directory it is fine
when I run ls on my root directory it hangs
when I run df -k it hangs

I can go into any remote mounted directory and everything works fine.

any suggestions.