RH7.3 not on first drive woes, or how to scroll back after panic

[Bill Freeman]

	Well, I did an upgrade of my 7.1 system to 7.3, but I can't
boot it.

	I'm a little weird in that I keep a 6.2 (as well as W98) on
hda (5 and 1, respectively), and the 7.1 installation is (was) on
hdd1.  (hdb is the cdrom drive. hdc is the zip drive.)

	That had been nasty with LILO, which didn't know how to play
with hdd.  I got around that by copying kernels and initrd's to the
/boot on hda5, added the appropriate entries to hda5's lilo.conf, and
ran lilo from the 6.2 system.  This all worked for kernel upgrades
through 2.4.9-34.

	To get rid of the uglyness I let the 7.3 installer put in
grub.  grub (after its configuration file was modified) happily boots
the 6.2 world and W98.  I'm also pretty sure that it's not responsible
for the 2.4.18-3 root=/dev/hdd1 problems, since the problem seems
identical booting from the boot floppy.

	I'd like to be more specific about what the boot problems are,
the beginning of them seem to have scrolled off the screen by the time
they have slowed down enough to read.  It manages to load the scsi
host adaptor driver (there is a hiatus while it probes the scsi bus,
so I can read a few things), so access to the inital ram disk would
appear to be fine.  (During this delay I get to see that there is an
error from modprobe looking for scsi_hostadapter, but it manages to
load aic7xxx anyway.)  The tailings on the screen seem to gurgle about
mising mount points, among other things, and not being able to pivot
root, so it's no surprise that it can't find init.  My best guess is
that it's failing to mount the root filesystem (hdd1), ant that things
go downhill from there (and, yes, I'm passing the root=/dev/hdd1
argument to the kernel).

	Best would be if one of you is able to say "Your problem
is...", followed by helpful text rather than anatomical
impossibilities.  Failing that, is there a way to slow down the boot
messages (remember, this is pre-init), or scroll them back after the
panic, so that I can collect better information?  Short of figuring
out how to arrange for a serial console, that is.

							Bill