I just bought a Western Digital 250gb hard drive and put in as a slave.
Ive had linux and win xp installed on my master b4 the new drive, but now I cant boot into linux.
I get a Kernel Panic, unable to mount root fs at hdb9

Im using Simply Mepis 2004 and when I put in the livecd, I can run QtParted and it will show me info on hda but as soon as I click on hdb the program unexpectedly quits.

Any Suggestions?

Check that your original hard drive is set to "master", rather than "slave" or "master no slave" or something like that.

I had to set the original to master with slave present in order to get the bios to recognize it, so the jumper is properly set.

Which IDE channel is the new drive on? If it's sharing the cable with your CD drive, then it will be /dev/hdd not /dev/hdb. At the risk of telling you something you are already totally familiar with

primary master = /dev/hda
primary slave = /dev/hdb
secondary master = /dev/hdc
secondary slave = /dev/hdd

I will agree with pingswept that it sounds like it could be a jumper issue. You might also try setting your original drive (the one with Linux and XP already installed) as "cable select", and the new drive a "slave". I don't know if that will solve the problem but it's something to try. -- J.W.

If the kernel is trying to mount the root at hdb9, are you really sure that your original hard drive was set-up as master ????. As said earlier, hdb is the slave of the primary IDE controller.

You can try this (if you're using LILO). Remove the new harddisk. Boot into Linux. Edit 'lilo.conf' and set the 'root' option to hda9. Save lilo.conf and run 'lilo'. Next edit your fstab file and point the Linux partitions to hda.

Attach the original harddisk as primary master and the new harddisk as primary slave.

Hope this works. If it doesn't, try to download Knoppix (Linux live cd) so you will be able to mount the Linux partitions and try to edit your lilo.conf and fstab to point to the right partitions.