How to stop hda->sr0 assignment

I installed Debian Etch with the 2.6.12-1-686-smp kernel from the Etch Testing CD's by manually selecting the drivers needed to identify and use the SATA disk drives. The modules needed on the system, where the SATA chipset is the Intel ICH7 chipset, were: scsi_mod, sg, ide_scsi, libata, sd_mod and ata_piix.

Once this configuration was up and running, the SATA disks were sda and sdb, the cdrom was /dev/hda and the REV drive was /dev/hdb.

At this point, everything worked, except that I could not make disaster recovery oriented bootable backups on the REV drive since ext2 wasn't compiled into the kernel. (Somebody wasn't thinking about disaster recovery when they decided to leave it as a module... RedHat did a similar thing when they decided to leave out "floppy"...)

Here is how I attempted to fix it:

Use aptitude to install the linux source and headers for kernel 2.6.12 from the Etch CD's.

cd /usr/src

cat linux-source-2.6.12.tar.bz2 | bunzip2 | tar xf -

ln -s linux-source-2.6.12 linux

cd /usr/src/linux

make mrproper

cp /boot/config-2.6.12-1-686-smp ./.config

vi .config

[ find the entry for CONFIG_EXT2_FS and change it from "m" to "y" ]

[ write and quit vi ]

make bzImage

make modules

make modules_install

make install

cd /lib/modules/2.6.12

mkdir initrd

ln kernel/security/capability.ko initrd/capability.ko

ln kernel/drivers/video/vesafb.ko initrd/vesafb.ko

mkinitrd -o /boot/initrd.img-2.6.12 2.6.12

Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and insert the new kernel into the choices for boot time with the following entry:

#####################################

title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.12

root (hd0,0)

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12 root=/dev/sda1 ro

initrd /boot/initrd-img-2.6.12

savedefault

boot

#####################################

When I do this, the entries for the cdrom and the REV drive are re-assigned from hda & hdb to sr0 and sr1...

How can I stop this re-assignment from occurring?

Can it be done in the kernel args in the grub entry?

(I need for them to be on hda and hdb during a recovery bootup...)

Thanks for any pointers,