Hi all! Thanks for the replies... I managed to figure out what was wrong: my custom-compiled kernel had the IDE drivers as *modules* (and I didn't list them in /etc/modules) -- so after the kernel finished initializing, it discovers that it didn't know *how* to read /dev/hda1 because it hadn't loaded the IDE drivers yet!! That was what the kernel panic was all about. :-)
Silly, silly, me... don't know why in the world I would configure the IDE drivers to be modules rather than compiled-in, but after managing to boot into the system with the older kernel on my Rescue Disk (which, of course, had built-in IDE drivers, not modules), I managed to recompile the kernel with the right config. Now the server is up and running. Thanks anyway for the help... T
