kernel has null dereference during boot

[hendrik@topoi.pooq.com]

While booting my newly installed woody system (Why not sarge?
It's a long story which will be told another time) the kernel
crashes,  recovers, and fails to make one of my hard disk
accessible.

Here's the relevant part of the dmesg output:

...
...
Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 6.31
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
PIIX: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 38
PIIX: chipset revision 2
PIIX: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
PIIX: neither IDE port enabled (BIOS)
PIIX: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 39
PIIX: chipset revision 2
PIIX: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
    ide0: BM-DMA at 0x3000-0x3007, BIOS settings: hda:pio, hdb:pio
    ide1: BM-DMA at 0x3008-0x300f, BIOS settings: hdc:pio, hdd:pio

hda: FUJITSU MPB3064ATU, ATA DISK drive
hdb: Mxo 89H             , ATA DISK drive
hdd: HL-DT-ST CD-ROM GCR-8520B, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
hda: 12672450 sectors (6488 MB), CHS=13410/15/63
hdb: 264241407 sectors (135292 MB) w/2111KiB Cache, CHS=16383/127/127
hdb: INVALID GEOMETRY: 127 PHYSICAL HEADS?
Partition check:
 /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0: [PTBL] [788/255/63] p1 p2 p3 p4 < p5 p6 p7 p8 p9 p10 >
Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 00000028
 printing eip:
c382f3c1
*pde = 00000000
Oops: 0000
CPU:    0
EIP:    0010:[<c382f3c1>]    Not tainted
EFLAGS: 00010212
eax: 00000000   ebx: 000003f0   ecx: 00000300   edx: 00000045
esi: c384b144   edi: 00000040   ebp: 00000040   esp: c2c49ee8
ds: 0018   es: 0018   ss: 0018
Process modprobe (pid: 28, stackpage=c2c49000)
Stack: c384b144 00000001 c384afe0 00000001 c384b210 03002980 c382f458 00000340 
       00000000 00000002 c3852980 000019e0 c3831fc5 c38524d9 c38529c0 c3851000 
       00000001 00000001 c01156fd c2c48000 400199d8 bfffc4dc bfffc49c 00001800 
Call Trace: [<c384b144>] [<c384afe0>] [<c384b210>] [<c382f458>] [<c3852980>] 
   [<c3831fc5>] [<c38524d9>] [<c38529c0>] [<c01156fd>] [<c3851060>] [<c0106d93>] 

Code: 83 78 28 00 74 09 56 8b 40 28 ff d0 83 c4 04 80 a6 9e 00 00 
 <3>ext3: No journal on filesystem on ide0(3,2)
Adding Swap: 128516k swap-space (priority -1)
Real Time Clock Driver v1.10e
...
...

By the way, I'm also wondering about the weird characters in the line
that identifies my second hard disk, an 80G Maxtor, but I don't think
they do any harm in themselves.

hdb: Mxo 89H             , ATA DISK drive

-- hendrik