I am running Debian Lenny 2.6.26-2-amd64.

POST works fine, I can get into BIOS. I am using the default BIOS with boot order of CD then my old SATA HD. There is another new SATA HD on the system.

The boot seems to go ok until I get a message saying it is waiting for the root device. After a few minutes the boot process drops to a initramfs shell. Some of the relevant messages are:

Gave up waiting for root device. Common problems:...
( lists some possible timeout setting changes )

ALERT! /dev/sda1 does not exist. Dropping to a shell!
( this is where I think the problem is )

At this point I have access to the initramfs shell. Looking through the log with dmesg I see the message:

Driver 'sd' needs updating -please use bus_type methods
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI removable disk
sd 0:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk

Is there anything I can do to get the boot process to finish? Particularly from the initramfs shell?

Thanks for the help.

The problem may be solved by creating a new ramdisk, containing the driver for your harddrive. However, the error shows that a certain partition isn't available. The cause may be that the order of recognision by the kernel is different. You may want to use /dev/sdb1 as boot argument instead. Try switching the places of the SATA cables first.

Drives plugged into the wrong SATA ports....

Linux tends to be very picky when it comes to hard drive order. You can most likely solve this 2 ways:

-Manually figure out the proper order of the drives

-AHCI mode in Bios

I'm guessing your config for the ramdrive was originally wanting to mount sda1 for root but now you (might) have changed that to sdb1 (or a variant) and so now it causes ftab to scew up. I don't actually use ftab anymore so I'm unsure about this now.

I disconnected all but the original SATA drive from the old machine and cleared CMOS.

The system now boots.

I actually have two 750 Gb SATA drives I plan to use a RAID 0 drive. Although both drives were recognized by the BIOS when I first started the rebuilt system, one of them is no longer recognized. In looking through the log file from dmesg I could see that ATA1 was my original drive, ATA2 had something in it but linux couldn't recognize what it was, ATA3 had the drive that BIOS recognized, but it had never been formatted.

I don't know why linux wouldn't accept the drive in ATA1 as sda1. Perhaps it was confused by the device in ATA2 that wasn't recognized by BIOS as a drive. I have to contact Western Digital to find out why the second drive isn't recognized and find out why I can't use more than 2Gb of memory, but those will be different posts.

Thanks for your suggestions, they were helpful.

Maineac