I am working on network provisioning of machines on a grid and been trying to install SLES9. Before provisionig real machines I am trying out this on virtual machines (VMWare). I have prepared the xml file with the autoinstallation options.
The problem I am facing is after the OS is installed without any manual intervention and the machine reboots, I get the following messages :

Waiting for device dev/sdax to appear: .........

No root device found; exiting to /bin/sh
sh: can't access tty; job control turned off

Here /dev/sdax is my root partition (where x = number).

And then I get the shell prompt where only few commands work.

A workaround that I tried was to use an invalid autoinstallation xml file and the yast automatic install failed and manual install prompted me with a dialog box where I had the option of booting the already installed OS and when i chose that I was able to log into the system.

And then I checked the /etc/grub.conf and also the /boot/grub/menu.lst files. But these seem to be ok.

I have looked all over the web and found no solution to this problem.

Please help me out.