I installed Debian sarge from a DVD to a PC with an Intel 875PBZ motherboard, 2 IDA drives, hda, hdb, 2 SATA drives sda, sdb, configured for RAID and a USB drive sdc.

I am installed with /dev/sdc1 as / and /dev/sdc3 as /home and do not want the other drives touched.

On rebooting after installation, GRUB comes up, I have to change root (hd4,0) to (hd0,0) then the boot process correctly starts.

From what I can tell, /dev/sda and /dev/sdb are mounted with sda printing out something like
/dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0: p1
and sdb
/dev/scsi/host1/bus0/target0//lun0: Unknown partition table

then I get this error:

pivot_root: No such file or directory
/sbin/init: 426: cannot open dev/console: No such file
Kernel panic: Attemped to kill init!

I have tried to edit the GRUB script for kernel....sda=noprobe sdb=noprobe but it has no effect.

At this point I am a bit stuck, since recovery mode does not work. I have looked around the /dev/sdc1/ file system using knoppix but nothing leaps out at me. Could I mkinitrd in knoppix to adjust the config of initrd? I have looked in the /var/log directory and there is no output from the bootup.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

The problem is that there is no /dev/console file. (cannot open /dev/console: No such file). You need to reinstall, or copy /dev/console from another working linux installation with the same kernel version.

You have a lot of drives and I am not sure what grub sees as root. However, I do know that you will see the error message you see (about /dev/console not being there) if grub is attempting to boot on the wrong boot device. You likely have grub attempting to boot linux from the wrong disk. I recently saw the same error on a system after I unplugged the IDE drive and moved it. The drive jumpers were set to "cable select" and I inadvertently plugged it into the middle connector. The BIOS therefore recognized the drive as hdb instead of hda, and Debian wouldn't boot. The last error I saw was /dev/console doesn't exist. You probablty need to find a way to point grub to the correct boot device. Wish I had more help. Good luck!

On which disk is GRUB located, not on the USB drive I presume.

What I think is happening is that the USB drivers are not loaded, or the SCSI drivers are not loaded. You have to compile these drivers (I'm not sure if it's the USB or SCSI divers, so just try some configurations and see which one works) as modules.

Next you'll have to create an initrd that contains those modules, so it can reach the disk and load the kernel. I think I got the same message when I created a wrong initrd which didn't contain my RAID (Promise FastTrak 100TX2) controller drivers and the loader couldn't load the file-system.

I'm not sure if I'm correct, but it certainly looks like it.