LinuxQuestions.org - Gentoo: mount: special device /dev/hdg* does not exist

very frustrated right now, been up for a few days and on my fourth reinstall and now this.
on my last reinstall I changed from xfs to reiserfs because of the warnings in the manual. now, when I reboot i get the error message for all drives: mount: special device * does not exist
I have searched all over these forums and others, google, etc but no one seemed to have a definative answer. here is my fstab (and my partitions are fine if i boot up with a mandrake rescue command):
now, i recompiled my kernel three times, i have reiserfs support enabled and each of the options mentioned in the instructions (virtual drive support, etc)
I'm at a loss and this is the first time this error has come up. oh yeah, im using gentoo-sources for my kernel sources.
Well, this has been a long weekend... i hope someone has some insight for me because i dont think i can stand another install.

this is what the bootup screen says (only things that looked like errors):

VP-IDE: detected chipset, but driver not compiled in
VP-IDE: chipset revision 6
<snip>
ds: no socket drivers loaded
FAT: bogus logical sector size 0
<snip>
VFS: Mounted root (reiserfs filesystem) readonly
<snip>
remounting root filesystem
checking root filesystem
reiserfsck: cannot open filesystem on "/dev/hdg7"
warning fsck.reiserfs for /dev/hdg7 exited with signal 6
filesystem repaired
remounting [ok]
checking all filesystems
fsck.ext2: no such file or directory while trying to open /dev/hdg5
/dev/hdg5:
mount: special device /dev/hdg8 does not exist
mount: special device /dev/hdg9 does not exist
mount: special device /dev/hdg10 does not exist
mount: special device /dev/hdg11 does not exist
<then the shit hits the fan>

here's my fstab:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
# $Header: /home/cvsroot/gentoo-src/rc-scripts/etc/fstab,v 1.10 2002/11/18 19:39:22 azarah Exp $
#
# noatime turns of atimes for increased performance (atimes normally aren't
# needed; notail increases performance of ReiserFS (at the expense of storage
# efficiency). It's safe to drop the noatime options if you want and to
# switch between notail and tail freely.
# <fs> <mountpoint> <type> <opts> <dump/pass>
# NOTE: If your BOOT partition is ReiserFS, add the notail option to opts.
/dev/hdg5 /boot ext2 noauto,noatime 1 2
/dev/hdg7 / reiserfs noatime 0 1
/dev/hdg6 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdg8 /usr reiserfs noatime 0 0
/dev/hdg9 /var reiserfs noatime 0 0
/dev/hdg10 /home rieserfs noatime 0 0
/dev/hdg11 /opt reiserfs noatime 0 0
/dev/cdroms/cdrom0 /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,ro 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# glibc 2.2 and above expects tmpfs to be mounted at /dev/shm for
# POSIX shared memory (shm_open, shm_unlink). Adding the following
# line to /etc/fstab should take care of this:
# (tmpfs is a dynamically expandable/shrinkable ramdisk, and will use almost no
# memory if not populated with files)
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0

here's my grub.conf:

default 0
timeout 30
splashimage=(hd0,4)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
#title=Gentoo
#root (hd0,4)
#kernel /bzImage root=/dev/hdg7
title=Windows XP Professional
map (hd1) (hd0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
root (hd1,0)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
title=Gentoo
root (hd0,4)
kernel /bzImage root=/dev/hdg7

it worked when i had my hd formatted the same way but with xfs (wish i never changed now, ridiculous...) so i doubt its a misconfigured grub.conf. also, if i change the params it won't boot at all.

also, i see people posting long messages like this that seem to be files. where are they located at? that is, are these boot up messages printed to a file and, if so, where can i grab them from so i can post the whole thing?

so, can i use the kernel from my mandrake cd safely?
(like put the vmlinuz image in my boot and change the path in grub to point to kernel=(hg1,4)/vmlinuz; or just rename vmlinuz to bzImage)
That way at least I could make sure it was my kernel that was the problem. Will this harm anything?