Help! kernels with hde2 and sdb2 as root devices.

[Sebastian Canagaratna <s-canagaratna@onu.edu>]

Hi:

 I have the following problem.
 
 I am using a Gateway 700CX with a 160 GB Maxtor ATA hard drive which
 uses SATA. I found that I could get the hard drive recognized only with
 Knoppix 3.3, and I used knx-hdinstall to install sid on the hard drives
 which are recognized as hde. The cd rom is recognized as sr0 and the
 Iomega zip drive  (750 MB) is recognized as sda. (Initially they are
 recognized as hda (zip drive) hdb (maxtor) and hdc (cdrom) and then
 they are reassigned. I was
 using  2.4.22 kernel but the Zip drive is not recognized consistently,
 with error messages like:

     hdd: DMA interrupt recovery
     hdd: lost inerrrupt
     ide-scsi: The scsi wants to send us more data than expected -
     discarding data
     ....
Occasionally it reads the drive but most of the time the zip drive is
useless. So I thought I would try kernel 2.6.0-test9.  I compiled the
SCSI SATA into the kernel. I made a bzdisk. Now the Maxtor drive is 
recognized as sdb, but it fails to boot giving a kernel panic that root 
drive cannot be found. (Remember that I am compiling the kernel 2.6.0
when I am running 2.4.22 with /dev/hde2 as my root drive). Running rdev /dev/fd0 gives 0x3def. Trying to change it with rdev /dev/fd0 /dev/sdb2 gives a disk that will not boot. When I try to change the root= to /dev/sdb2 in lilo.conf 
and run lilo I get an error message saying that there is no such drive. 
Is it possible to change from one kernel to another if the root drive is being changed from /dev/hde2 to /dev/sdb2?

Any suggestions will be appreciated.

Thanks.

Sebastian Canagaratna
Department of Chemistry
Ohio Northern University
Ada, OH 45810