Booting Problem SATA large disk

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

Hi:

 I am running unstable Debian with Linux 2.6.6. kernel.
 My computer is a Gateway computer with a large (160GB) disk with
 SATA controller. I have Windows XP on hda1, and linux on hda2, with
 partitions hda3,5,6 etc for home, usr, var, etc.

 I had problems installing Linux on the hard drive because of the SATA
 drive. Knoppix seemed to boot up, and with the help of that I managed
 to install 2.6.0-test9 kernel. The Hard drive seemed to be changed to
 sdb, with Linux on the sdb2 partition. The 750 MB Iomega zip was
 recognized as sda. The dvd rom was recognized as sr0. I changed the
 /etc/fstab to these values and managed to make a bootdisk with
 syslinux; I do not remember precisely what I did, but I presume I used
 Knoppid. It boots up only when I do not give any parameters at the boot
 prompt. If I attempt to give root=/dev/sdb2, it goes into kernel panic. This is able to boot up, but I am unable to dual-boot from
 Windows: it just hangs.

 I recently thought I would install the 2.6.6. kernel.  They recommend
 that the cd use hte ide-cd rather than the scsi and I built the kernel
 accordingly.  I used syslinux to make a boot disk, but this goes into
 kernel panic, wanting a valid root=" " paramter. No parameter seems to
 work. I have tried, lilo and grub and all of them do the same thing. I
 presume this has something to do with the fact that to the bios the
 disk is hda, and when the scsi SATA is used in 2.6.6 this is changed.

 Any suggestions as to how to proceed will be appreciated.

 Thanks.


 Sebastian Canagaratna

 Department of Chemistry 
 Ohio Northern University
 Ada, OH 45810