New, second hdd, gives kernel panic in startup...
 

I got myself a second hdd to use as a backup (I like using luckyBackup).

I also decided to upgrade some hardware so that what I have now from my old system I can use to put together a much, much faster and more stable system for my 73 year old mom.

So, I got myself a new (to me) MOBO (ASUS M5A97LE R2.0), new Athlon cpu (old=athlon II X2 250, new=athlon II X2 260), similar video card (old=GeForce GT520 1GB w/ HDMI, DVI and VGA. new=GeForce GT520 1GB w/ two DVI), and a new(ish) hdd (160GB pull from a Dell).

Got everything installed and figured I'd not hook up the original hdd and instead hook up the new hdd and install Slackware 14 on it. This seemed to work okay *until* I hooked up the other hdd, set them up which to start first (1-DVD, 2-old hdd, 3-new hdd) in BIOS.

Things start fine and I get to the screen where all the stuff is scrolling by at a million miles per second and then suddenly freezes with a kernel panic.

I unplug the new hdd and try again and it freezes again with a kernel panic. Now I start to worry a little.

Somehow I figured out how to get the old hdd fired up and running and went to my lilo.conf and commented out the stuff for the old backup hdd and ran lilo.

Rebooted and it worked...my old hdd fired right up like normal and all is normal except I have no backup hdd at the moment.

I plugged the new hdd in and fired up the system with the Slackware disc in the dvd.

Unfortunately fdisk sees my old, original hdd as sdb and the new backup hdd as sda, but I figure I'll work around it and go ahead and load everything for the new hdd. It won't accept the lilo I make for it though and can't figure out why. And again, when I reboot, it stops with a kernel panic until I unplug the new hdd and reboot and everything is fine.

I have three partitions on each hdd - swap, /, and /home. I also always put lilo in / and not the MBR.

Any ideas what the heck I'm screwing up? I really hate using the system without a backup, 'cause I'm always tinkering and I eventually mess things up enough that I need to use the backup, heh.

Jumpers on the disks. Master/slave stuff?

Use labels from a live parted magic/rescue cd or use uuids.
change fstab
there is no need to adjust jumpers.

Okay...have it sorted out a little more, but still have a problem.

The kernel panic stopped when I either a)took the jumper completely off my normal hdd I boot into, or b)changed up the way the sata cables were plugged into the MoBo (I had my normal hdd at #4, the new hdd at #5, they're now at #1 and #2 respectively), or c)or both

I'm now able to boot back to my normal hdd. I changed the fstab of the new hdd to have sdb instead of sda.

Unfortunately, from my normal hdd I can't see the /home partition of the new hdd though I *can* see the / partition of the new hdd obviously since I changed the fstab...which is weird.

I also can't boot into the new hdd as all I have are two DVI connections on my video card so that when I try I eventually get a 'not supported' type of message.

So, how do I:

Get a /home partition on the new hdd? Can I boot up a parted magic live DVD and just add it or how does that work?

Get past the problem of not being able to see anything with no VGA adapter and only DVI?

Did you update your fstab to uuid as suggested? If the system if booting successfully, you can mount the non-root drive manually to the desired directory. Once you have it mounted, update the fstab accordingly.

I don't know how to update it to uuid, I simply changed anything that said 'sda' to 'sdb' in kate and saved it.

I'll try to see if I can mount the drive like you said. I don't know how on the cli, but maybe I can find something in krusader that will do it for me.

Okay, got it all figured out. Seems I've been on a day and a half of stupid. Simply forgot to ad a user and then forgot that there's not going to be any files or directories in /home until I start putting stuff in it...so I was seeing 'nothing' and thinking there was no /home partition.

Anyway, both hdd's now start up (I had to borrow a video card that had a vga adapter and then copied the nvidia installer from my main hdd to the spare one and installed it so that I could use my DVI adapter on my own card).

Thanks for the suggestions and help everyone, much appreciated.