I have an older system I was going to resurect for experimentation but I'm having a slight problem. The system has an abit BP6 motherboard (socket 370 Dual CPU dual IDE controllers.)

I've loaded Etch onto the system and all went without a hitch until I try to restart the system. The system will not boot, and it's pretty obvious why.. It starts to boot, but then fails because it cannot mount the filesystem.

the HPT366 Controller module is being loaded first and the intel controller is being loaded second. I don't want to use the hpt366 IDE contrrollers and have everything attached to the intel IDE controller.

Grub is looking for everything on hd0,0 or /dev/hda
but when the system boots the only HD in the system comes up as /dev/hde

Yes the simple approach would seem to be disable the HPT 366 Controller in BIOS, but for some bizarre reason when I do that I loose the CDROM drive which is attached to the secondary IDE channesl on the intel controller. the HPT366 isn't disabled and the system still fails to boot due to the same issue.

Yes it appears there are some minor hardware quirks, but what I'm looking for is, How can I either change the order the IDE controllers are brought up or blacklist the hpt366 all together ?

Thanks

I can think of a few ways:
a) change the sequence of loading what modules when in the boot process. That requires a rebuild of the initrd file, if you use one. If you don't, you'll need to rebuild the kernel and edit it's makefile somewhere...
b) swap the IDE controllers in Grub. I've read about it somewhere, can't remember where though. (errr, I can after some thought: it was in a Dutch forum, so unless you can read Dutch it won't be of any use I guess)
c) tell Grub to boot from the other controller. Don't know how, I presume somebody documented it somewhere.

Just what I could come up with in this short time. I didn't do research on this, but I know you know how to use Google