Debian switches driver letters preventing boot

[Gmail <mfrost8@gmail.com>]

Hello.  I'm running the 'testing' release.  I found that once I upgrade
to the 2.6.18 kernel my box wouldn't boot.

The boot lines in my grub's menu.lst lines are (with different
variations for version number):

    /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-3-686 root=/dev/hda1 ro vga=791

What appears to be happening is that while the kernel starts to boot, it
seems to change the drive letter of the disk containing the / partition
to /dev/hde.  I'm not entirely clear about the boot process, but I
believe this happens when the initrd partition is mounted.

No amount of futzing with the fstab seems to come up with a
configuration that will work for me.

If I boot to single user mode, I can usually manage to manually mount
the other filesystems.  So for instance, while all my system partitions
are on the same physical drive, I currently have the following:

# mount
/dev/hde1 on / type ext3 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
tmpfs on /lib/init/rw type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,mode=0755)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
procbususb on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw)
udev on /dev type tmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=620)
/dev/hda6 on /usr type ext3 (rw)
/dev/hda7 on /var type ext3 (rw)
/dev/hda8 on /home type ext3 (rw)


That is, /usr, /var, and /home are mounted with /dev/hda* and / is
mounted as /dev/hde even though it's the same drive.

The boot drive is on an HPT366 controller, not the motherboard's
built-in IDE controller.

Is this something I can fix by configuring udev somehow?

Thanks

Mark