The machine refuses to boot after installing a christmas gift (DVD drive)... the distro is Mandrake 9.0 ... before that installation was:

hda (hard disk) on ide0 master (W98)
CDRW (ide) on ide0 slave
hdb (hard disk) on ide1 master (Mdk 9)

now the picture is:
hda (hard disk) on ide0 master (W98)
hdb (hard disk) on ide0 slave (Mdk 9)
CDRW (ide) on ide1 master
DVD (ide) on ide1 slave

the first attempt to boot this was completely unsuccessful, and I tried to work it out entering in "rescue mode", chrooting to the main linux partition and executing /sbin/lilo. It was ok but... nothing changes. Actually this is the result of the last attempt to boot:

kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k ide-cd, errno = 2
mount: error 6 mounting ext3 flags kernel panic: no init found
try passing init=option to kernel

I've checked for the ide-cd module and it's there (in /lib/modules/<kernel version>/kernel/drivers/ide (in .gz)

Any idea about what's happening here ??

TIA

boot to rescue mode and edit /etc/lilo.conf your root device has changed so you must change it to correct drive /dev/hdb in your case, the partition number shouldn't be affected, after you made changes re-run lilo. Also change the append statement for your scsi emulated cdrw it has changed the device name

Right, I have made the changes in lilo.conf, now the machine boots from hd but with some errors about checking filesystems... root partition was hdc1 and now is hdb1 ... so is checking the cdrw !!!

what to do now ?? (TIAA)

Hey... after re-touching /etc/fstab -simply replacing hdc with hdb for all partitions (/ , /usr, /home, swap)- the system works perfectly !!!! (i.e. the partition numbers didn´t change as expected).

Thanks neo77777 !!!!!

Well I was just goig to suggest you to take a look at /etc/fstab but you did it yourself, you are welcome.