I have a Promise SATA 376 controller and I have successfully
compiled the drivers. The load fine once the system has booted
and I can use the drive without problems. I would, however, like
to boot directly from the drive. After unsuccessfully trying to
compile the driver into the kernel, I am now attempting to
use initrd to load the module. I am using gentoo, and have
installed mkinitrd. It successfully creates the initrd image, and
when the system boots, I see that the correct modules are
being loaded successfully because I get the tainted kernel
warning about non-gpl code.

The system eventually hangs and the last 4 lines look like:

Freeing unused kernel 116k (not sure about this line)
insmod: a module named sr_mod already exists
insmod: a module named ft3xx already exists
Kernel panic: Attempt to kill init

Why would I get the insmod errors after both modules were
successfully installed. Initrd completes several other tasks after
the initial successful install of the two modules. It completes all
other remaining tasks in linuxrc and then gives the error. I don't
understand what could be causing this.

Thanks in advance