Kernel panic on boot with kernel 2.6.10 (SATA SiL 3112A issue maybe) & how to modify my initrd

[Andrey Andreev <andreev@cs.helsinki.fi>]

Hi,

WARNING: I have been a Linux user for some years now, but I just got
into Debian a week ago, so I feel particularly dangerous to my own
system - please look out for idiocies I committed being overconfident in
my GNU/Linux competence.

So, I installed Debian 3.1 testing with kernel 2.6, and after a while
went to /etc/apt/source.list and changed testing to unstable. Then I ran
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade, which went fine. Now I was running
kernel 2.6.7.

I was aware of security issues with the 2.6.7 kernels (at least on
Fedora, which is where I came from), so I decided to upgrade to 2.6.10.

I did
	apt-get install kernel-image-2.6.10-1-k7
(yes, I have athlon XP)

I rebooted and I got a panic at boot, looking like

8<------------------------------------------------------>8
[snip-a-lot]
ide1 at 0x170-1x177, 0x376 on irq 15
ERROR: Removing 'pdc202xx_new': Device or resource busy
[snip ~20 similiar errors]
ERROR: Removing 'via82cxxx': Device or resource busy
pivot_root: No such file or directory
/sbin/init: 431 cannot open dev/console: No such file
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attepted to kill init!
8<------------------------------------------------------>8

Now ide1 is supposed to be my SiI3112A (rev 02) Serial ATA controller, 
which has my Maxtor 6Y160M0 SATA drive, where Debian is installed.

From what I remember from my Fedora kernels, 2.6.7 was the last kernel 
to use siimage, and the next kernels supported SiI3112 through libata 
with the sata_sil module. Around that time drives on the controller 
started appearing as SCSI devices.

So I tried replacing root=/dev/hde1 with root=/dev/sda1 or with 
root=LABEL=/1 for 2.6.10 in /boot/grub/menu.lst, but that fixed nothing.

So i got my /boot/initrd.img-2.6.10-1-k7, copied it someplace safe, was 
surprised to see it is using cramfs instead of being a gziped ext2 
image, so i did:

mount -t cramfs -o loop initrd.img-2.6.10-1-k7 /home/andrei/kh/image

I found a file loadmodules under it, decided to add
	"modprobe -k sata_sil 2> /dev/null"
 to it (sata_sil.ko is present in the 
lib/modules/2.6.10-1-k7/kernel/drivers/scsi/ in the initrd image), and 
failed miserably, as cramfs is readonly. So now I am lost.

What do I do next? How do I modify initrd in Debian? I found mkinitrd 
mistifying.

Thanks,

Andro