Hey, just letting everyone know that this is my first post and I am more or less an ignorant linux user that is really eager to give up windows completely.

I installed Debian sarge, but then upgraded to Debian etch and I have been using kernel 2.4. I tried to get my GUI working with very little success. I decided to install my nVidia video card drivers, but I would get an error saying something in my sources.list file was missing. A friend recommended I should upgrade to kernel 2.6 anyway because he mentioned that Xorg doesn't work well with 2.4 and said that it would help me in the longterm anyway. I downloaded and installed 2.6 but now everytime I try to load it up I get a message during the end of the boot saying...

ALERT! /dev/hda2 does not exist
Dropping to a shell!

I can still work in my 2.4 kernel if I load it up with GRUB, so what can I do to fix this problem? I have been on IRC chats but no one has really been able to help me out.

Did you compile 2.6 yourself? If so, maybe you left out support for your filesystem. Maybe you have initrd problems? Maybe you don't have a working hotplug/udev system?

No, I don't think I had to compile this version of 2.6. I wen't on IRC chat again though and someone helped me out.

I'll post what should be done just for future reference for anyone having this problem.

I had an SATA hard drive, so whenever I switched to 2.6 I had to change /boot/grub/menu.lst. To the extent of my knowledge now, since 2.6 behaves differently with SATA drivers, I can not have /dev/hda2 the same, I need to change it to /dev/sda2 to actually work with an SATA hdd.

So your problem is solved, correct?

This problem is solved, I have many others but I'm not going to bother posting about them until I try other things and go through other resources. I don't feel like posting on this for every small problem I have.