"modprobe: Can't locate module block-major-22" when booting - what to fix?

["Daniel B." <dsb@smart.net>]

If modprobe is complaining:

  modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module block-major-22

that means that the kernel doesn't know which module handles major 
device number 22, right?  

That means that whichever module is supposed to handle major device
number 22 hasn't been loaded and hasn't "told" the kernel that it
handles device number 22, right?

Since block-major-22 is the secondary IDE controller (ide1), does 
that mean that module ide-mod (or ide-disk or whatever) isn't loaded?  

What mechanism loads initial modules when booting with initrd?
(Is something supposed to load all available modules to get them to
register there handled device numbers?  Is something supposed to list
selected modules to load?)


My problem is that I've tried building and installing kernel 2.4.22 
on woody, but when I try to boot, I get the errors:

  modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module block-major-22
  mount: /dev2/root is not a valid block device
  modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module block-major-22
  mount: /dev2/root is not a valid block device
  modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module block-major-22
  mount: /dev2/root is not a valid block device
  warning: can't open /etc/mtab: No such file or directory
  pivot_root: No such file or directory
  /sbin/init: cannot open dev/console: no such file
  Kernel panic: Attempted to kill init!

I build this using the 2.4.22-2 source package and k7-smp kernel 
configuration from unstable, building on a fairly-pure woody system
using make-kpkg.   

(Earlier, I built a 2.4.18 kernel with a slightly customized 
configuration, and didn't have this problem.)

So in which direction do I look to diagnose and solve this problem?


Thanks,
Daniel
-- 
Daniel Barclay
dsb@smart.net