Matt Price wrote:
So it semes to me I have to somehow temporarily run udev, or temporarily disable udev, or something, so that I can create the /dev/hda devices I need to mount the relevant partitions. BUt I don'tknow how to do that.
Try running MAKEDEV, it should give all the missing devices the old fashioned way. If that does not work, "mknod /dev/hda b 3 0".