LinuxQuestions.org - Kernel on harddrive, root on USB stick

Hello,
I have the following dilemma:
Yesterday i got a OCZ Throttle 16gb eSATA flash drive with the thought of installing my OS on it (speed, speed). Then I found out that my notebook (Acer Aspire 5935G) cannot boot from an eSATA flash drive :(

So my tests with different bootloaders led me to non-working vista and linux (screwed the mbr, fixing it now) - they all rely on BIOS device discovery.

During the tests I got a genius idea, though I am not advanced enough to know if it will work, before I try it.

The idea is as follows:
1) Install some linux on the harddrive (along with vista(dualboot))
2) Create custom kernel which will load the necessary drivers for eSATA drive (with all the necessary modules built in)
3) Boot the custom kernel with root on the eSATA drive

The problem comes between 2 and 3 - how the hell can I tell the kernel that my root partition is on a device, not recognized by BIOS (and GRUB)? Will it work just like:
kernel=/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sdX(my eSATA drive) ?

Or it's kernel's design not to be able to do that (load necessary drivers, then switch to root partition), though I see that you can have kernel and root on different partitions (or drives), but they need to be discovered by BIOS.

Any help and ideas would be appreciated!

Greetings
Biser