I'm running Mandrake 9.0 with the stock kernel. Everything was fine until I started having problems with my HDD. Apparently there were physical problems with it. I would boot my system off a Knoppix CD and fsck.ext3 on all the partitions of the HDD which would recover the journal, but within a few minutes of booting MDK from the HDD I would start to get write errors.

So I bought a new hard disk, identical to the previous drive. The new hd went on the secondary IDE controller. So now I had HDA as the bad drive and HDC as the good drive. I partitioned the new drive from Knoppix and copied all the files from HDA to HDC with tar. Everything seemed like it went fine.

I changed /etc/fstab so everything was being mounted from HDC. The only thing I didn't switch over was booting (it still booted off of HDA). Just the other day I had more problems with HDA and now it seems pretty much dead (can no longer boot from it). I switched the boot device in the BIOS to boot from HDC and I made sure I ran LILO to install the MBR on HDC (same kernels and everything).

Here's the problem. I can get the boot splash on HDC and select my kernel. If I choose the stock kernel, I get the line that says loading kernel, then four lines that same unknown bridge, assuming transparent, then it hangs. If I choose the failsafe kernel option (which includes nodevfs) it will boot all the way through the kernel to the point where it says "remounting devfs in the proper place" then it halts. It seems to me that the problem is with mounting devfs, but I have no idea why or what I can do to fix it. Everything should be the same as the other hard drive since I copied everything to the correct partitions.

How can I fix it so that devfs loads properly?

Come to think of it, I'm not so sure it's devfs since I can't seem to find any references to that on my system. Could it be that / isn't being mounted correctly (since checking for devfs would require reading from /)? If so, what would cause a partition to not be mountable at boot when I can mount it with Knoppix?