more kernel booting woes

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

In case anybody remembers, I was previously having problems with
booting the debian standard kernel on my machine (a custom compiled
kernel works fine).  In that case, the problem was intermittent:
sometimes it would dump me into the emergency shell, where I could
just mount the root filesystem by hand and the boot would continue
successfully.  Sometimes that _didn't_ happen, and I guess the problem
probably had something to do with a race condition involving the scsi
root disk (the adaptec driver by default seems to have a stupidly long
delay to let the scsi bus settle, like 15 seconds [my hand-compiled
kernel uses a delay of 200ms!]).

So recently I upgraded my kernel to "vmlinuz-2.6.22-2-686" (version
2.6.22-4), thinking maybe things might work a bit better ... and now, it
won't boot at all!!!  Argh...

It again dumps me into the emergency shell, and I _can_ mount the root
device by hand like I could before, using the command:

    mount -text2 /dev/root /root

If I then (again, as before) hit ^D to let the boot continue, it gives
an error message like:

   ...: /bin/sh file not found "auto"

and then it panics and halts (sorry don't remember the exact wording of the
message).

Have the details of the boot scripts changed between "vmlinuz-2.6.22-1-686"
(the previous version I was running, which would boot with hand assistance)
and "vmlinuz-2.6.22-2-686"?  Anybody have any ideas what might be
happening?  What is this "auto"...?

[My root disk is a scsi disk hanging off an Adaptec AHA-2940U controller;
it's using the "aic7xxx" driver.]

Thanks,

-Miles

-- 
80% of success is just showing up.  --Woody Allen