unbootable system after fresh 4.0r5 installation

[Jukka Salmi <j+debian@2008.salmi.ch>]

Hello,

I just installed Debian 4.0r5 on a i386 systems (Dell PowerEdge 2950).
While the installer seemed to have succeeded without problems, the
freshly installed system didn't boot because its root file systems could
not be found:

	Begin: Waiting for root file system... ...
	[...]
	sd 3:0:0:0: Attached scsi removable disk sdb

At this point the system hanged for some minutes, until

	ALERT! /dev/sdb3 does not exist. Dropping to a shell!

was output and the BusyBox shell was executed.

But indeed there is no /dev/sdb; there's only one (logical) disk
present, /dev/sda.

While the installer was running I ran `fdisk -l /dev/sdb' and saw the
partitions I created.  (I don't know what the installer kernel thought
/dev/sda was.)  Reading /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst after the
failed boot, it seems that for some strange reason the whole system was
installed to /dev/sdb.  Fixing these files (sdb -> sda) and running
update-grub(8) resulted in a bootable system.

Befor debugging this further: is this a known problem?


TIA, Jukka

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