Problem with mkinitrd

[Pierre Burri <pierre@globeall.de>]

Hello Debian-Friends,

I'm trying to install debian on a free partition, directly from the net. There 
was a article in a german Linux-Magazin, howto move a dedicated server with 
suse 7.2 to debian. I installed a minimal potato, did an update and an 
upgrade to sid . To do the installation, I did a "chroot" to my free 
partition and a "mount -t proc proc /proc". Everything worked fine until the 
kernel installation (apt-get -y installation kernel-image-2.4.19-686). The 
problem is with "mkinitrd" that doesn't find the root partition. I can 
reproduce the problem by invoking directly mkinitrd. 
I would greatly appreciate some help. 

Here the terminal output:
sun:/# dpkg --configure kernel-image-2.4.19-686
Setting up  (2.4.19-3) ...

/usr/sbin/mkinitrd: Cannot determine root device
Failed to create initrd image.
dpkg: error processing kernel-image-2.4.19-686 (--configure):
 subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 29
Errors were encountered while processing:
 kernel-image-2.4.19-686

here is my /etc/lilo.conf:
sun:/# cat /etc/lilo.conf 
boot    = /dev/hda11
change-rules
reset
read-only
lba32
prompt
timeout = 80

  image  = /vmlinuz
  label  = debian
  root   = /dev/hda11
  initrd = /initrd.img