A Socket 370 board died and I have tried to replace it with a Socket 478, transplanted from another PC.

I am using Debian Unstable. When I tried to boot the computer I got:

several times, then variants on this, then finally a kernel panic.

At the time of this error the machine had an 80GB PATA disc as hda, a 2.6GB disc as hdb. Hdc and hdd were a CD-writer and as DVD-ROM.

I don't know how relevant the following may be:

When I attached the 2 SATA drives which were previously attached to this board strange things happened during the boot. It appears that the PC begins to boot fron a SATA drive but then carries on from the PATA drive so that the PC ends up with the computer name from the PATA.

The only way I could get this machine to run is to attach the PATA drive to a USB adapter.

Could somebody please suggest a way out of this?

Enter the BIOS and select which device it should boot from. Mind you, for that new mobo you'll need other drivers in the RAMdisk, so a re-install might be worth considering anyway.

I've tried that but to no avail. I've googled this problem and I found lots of people with the same question and no answer.

A major part of the problem seems to be that on this machine I used yaird.

One possibility is to try to copy the ramdisc image from my other PC where I use initramfs.

The other possibility I can see is to reinstall the kernel from a Debian install disc.

I would like to cause minimal disruption to what is (in my opinion) a carefully and lovingly crafted Debian installation.

Is it possible to boot from an installation CD and just sort out this problem? I don't want to jump in and mess things up further.

This is how I fixed the problem:

Boot from Debian Install CD:
(or whichever partition is the root one)

Go through the install dialogs then open a shell in the root partition.
Mount the other partitions in their correct place. You may need to use fdisk to work out what you have and there may need to be a certain amount of trial and error.

If you used yaird (which was the root of my problem) install initramfs-tools

I'm not sure if this is necessary but I reinstalled the kernel:

then:

Ignore the error messages unless they are fatal.

Reboot.

Voila!