kernel problems -- boot and network

[dman <dsh8290@rit.edu>]

I'm having some problems with kernels in the areas of booting and
network.  First some background :

I now have a laptop (Dell 7500) at work that I am allowed to install
Debian (woohoo!).  The install went great.  I used a potato cd (2.2r2)
then switched to woody.  The machine has a 3Com PCMCIA network adapter
that uses the 3c575_cb driver.  THat is with kernel 2.2.18pre21 that
was on my potato disc.

I was able to install kernel image 2.4.9-686 and it boots fine with or
without devfs.  However, it doesn't seem to have the driver for the
NIC nor does it have VESA framebuffer support.

I compiled my own custom 2.4.9 (and 2.4.8) kernel with devfs mounted
at boot time, my NIC driver, VESA framebuffer and initrd support.
However, neither of these kernels will boot.  The fb stuff works and
the NIC is found, but the boot process stops with :


Freeing initrd memory: 864k freed
FAT: bogus logical sector size 0
FAT: bogus logical sector size 0
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 01:00


I have no FAT partitions.  All partitions are ext2 : /dev/hda1 as
/boot , /dev/hda2 as nothing (will be win2k later) , /devhda3 as swap
and /dev/hda4 as /.  What device is 01:00?  I don't think it is
/dev/hda4.  I have also verified that I compiled ext2 support into the
kernel.


I have kernel 2.4.8 working great on my desktop system with devfs, 
framebuffer and initrd support.  I am at a loss as to what could be
the problem.

-D