For the benefit of anyone who cares, I found the answer to my problem. It has been solved by some engineers over at Dell. They created a project called Enhanced Disk Drive services a.k.a EDD, which has been incorporated into the 2.6 Linux kernel as the CONFIG_EDD option.

It worked marvelously for me. You have to load the edd.ko module for it to work. It will then collect the BIOS drive info into the /sys/firmware/edd folder. The info concerning the boot device is
found in the int13_dev80 folder. You can simply compare the cylinders with the output of "fdisk -l" to determine the Linux partition name of your boot device.

Regards,
Dallas

good, i'm glad you got it figured out!

i saw the EDD thing when i googled but i didn't think it would help you as it looked (to me) like it required a kernel recompile.

be sure to tag your posts so others searching can find them easier!

best of luck
-LC