Ok.. i'm having some of the same problems that people with serial ATA drives are also experiencing.. namely the kernel panic - unable to mount root FS..

i've spent quite a while trying to make it work, with no avail..

is this something that's going to be addressed in R5 non-alpha / r6 ??

i can get debian to work with other distributions, but haven't been able to get this knoppmyth to boot properly..

hardware is an IBM 4500R (P3) with adaptec 2100s raid controller and 2 18GB drives and 2 hauppage pvr250s..

it has one ide onboard.. and no real option to run an IDE HD as a boot device unless i rip out the CDrom.. which i just might have to do if i want to get this hardware to work.

Can't you put an ide hdd as master & cdrom as slave on the same ide channel?

yea i can.. but it means giving up the slimline cdrom drive.. means i gotta suck up space in the chassis for another cd drive and a harddrive, where i was gonna put a dds4 dat drive for archiving old video.

it'd be much nicer to just be able to boot off the scsi.. and i probably don't understand why it can't do it.. just the same i can't see why it shouldn't be able to do it..

if i have to use IDE guess it just means i have more space for the /cache and /myth filesystems on the scsi drives..

What have you tried so far? editing lilo.conf and re-running lilo? Recompiling the kernel with the correct drivers compiled in (not as modules)?

i've tried editing lilo and re-running it.. tried installing it to the MBR and also to the filesystem..

done the whole chroot deal and lilo -v etc etc..

recompile? above my head.. i don't have lots of time to "learn" linux.. i press keys, bit buttons, swear when appropriate and most of the time scratch my head thinking i should just install windows and mediaportal.. except it doesn't do front ends..

i slapped another cd drive and hd into it last night.. but the cd drive is old and doesn't like the burned CD's.. so i'll replace it with another drive tonight, give it another go.

how would one go about recompiling the kernel to achieve this?

can't say i've ever understood linux.. it boots off of /dev/sda1 , reads files from the partition, then goes to mount it.. and says it can't.. LOL *scratches head*..

it's all greek to me.