The IDE controller that isn't working for Rick is driven by the
aec62xx
driver, off the PCI bus. This driver *is* in the appropriate udebs and
*is* being loaded in the floppy build, but the IDE devices attached to
it are not being detected. Search for "Probing" in the logs and you'll
see what I mean.
It looks to me as if ide-probe, being built-in, is run before the
modular IDE drivers are loaded by hw-detect, and doesn't get a
chance to
run again. I note that, on i386, CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDE=m, while the
powerpc-small config has CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDE=y. I suspect that
modularizing this would fix the problem. That might well be far too
risky a change for sarge at this point, though.