Recent upgrade causes drive lettering scheme to alternate from hda to hde

[Adam Rosi-Kessel <adam@rosi-kessel.org>]

I recently upgrade a perfectly functional sarge laptop to etch. It has
one standard internal IDE hard drive. Now, about half the time it boots
up as hda, and the other half the time it boots up as hde. After the
initramfs stage, if the drive is identified as hde, it fails to boot
unless I create a symlink from /dev/hde2 to /dev/hda2. There seems to be
no rhyme or reason to why the same drive sometimes appears as hda and
sometimes as hde.

Any ideas what's going on?