I had slack 10 with dropline installed and working, then I removed everything from the case I had it in, and built a new case from scratch to better serve the intended end purpose of my Linux box (a router/firewall).

Well, today, 3 weeks lator, I finally assembled everything back together, but upon bootup, it goes into Lilo, and I boot to Slack, but the install stops with

Kernel Panic......something that tells me it can't find my HDD to boot from? 3:02 or some such, and then I believe it tells me to pass options to the Kernel.

Looking up earlier in the boot sequence, it almost looks as if it is trying to load a SCSI hdd?

I don't know... This computer I'm typing on now is in another room, so I could type the exact errors if necessary, but it would be rather time consuming!

Perhaps someone will realize which options need to be passed to the Kernel so I needn't reinstall Slack&Dropline again! What an adventure that was.

Anyway, thanks for any input you can give!

If you have switched the position of a given hard drive during your transfer from one machine to the next, it is possible that the previous hardware settings don't apply to how you've got things set up in the new cabinet. This mainly has to do with systems with multiple hard drives.

For reference:
/dev/hda = primary master
/dev/hdb = primary slave
/dev/hdc = secondary master
/dev/hdd = secondary slave

If your original setup used, for instance, /dev/hda and /dev/hdb, and reflected that fact in your /etc/fstab file, then if you "re-positioned" those drives as /dev/hda and /dev/hdd in the new cabinet, Yes, you would run into problems because your devices are no longer in the expected positions. Basically the easiest thing to do is copy the old machine's setup in the new one, and/or adjust the existing settings to reflect the new layout -- J.W.

One other thing - just so you know.

*nix has no capacity for addressing IDE equipment. In the world of Linux, Unix, BSD, Solaris, AIX, etc, there is no such thing as an IDE drive.

All IDE hardware is addressed by the kernel as a SCSI device. The ide-scsi module(s) are responsible for translating these requests to/from the phyical drives.
This is the reason you see SCSI messages on an IDE machine.

well, I can't boot into the system...it seems to halt while loading linux.

hmm...I'm pretty sure that the first slot on the ide cable is plugged into what should be hdb, which is slave, correct? and the plug on the end of the cable is on hda. which would make it master. those are the correct settings, no? obviously it finds at least some boot information, or it wouldn't even load Lilo.

The cable config is correct, if the drives are jumpered to master/slave configuration.
If they are set to Cable Select, however, it shouldn't matter.

umm, shouldnt it? won't master be set to hda and slave to hdb?