IDE detection problems during PPC installation

[Jon Chambers]

Hi there.

This problem has been too technical to get help from the user community,
and I haven't isolated things enough to file a useful bug report.
Please excuse me if this is not the appropriate venue.

At any rate, I'm trying to install Warty on a blue/white G3.  I'm using
the PPC installation disc.  The box has a SCSI PCI card with nothing
connected to it, two hard drives on one IDE channel, and a CD/DVD-ROM
drive as the master on another channel.  When the installer boots, it
immediately assigns the CD/DVD drive to hda, leaving the hard drives to
appear as hdc/hdd.  Passing ide=reverse to the installation kernel has
no effect on this, although the ide subsystem will at least acknowledge
that it has received and understood the argument.

Upon booting into any other operating system in any way (to the new
Ubuntu installation, from a Gentoo liveCD, to MacOS), the IDE channels
come up in the opposite order -- the hard drives become hda and hdb,
while the CD drive becomes hdc.  This, as you can imagine, wreaks havoc
with the filesystem and bootloader configuration.

Upon attempting to boot the new Ubuntu installation, the following
happens almost immediately:

[TUX LOGO]
audit (string_of_numbers): initializes
starting ubuntu
pivot_root no such file or directory
/sbin/init/: 429: cannot open dev/console: no such file
Kernel Panic: Attempted to kill init!

The problem has been discussed extensively on the forums (see
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=8050 for a fairly complete
list -- I've contributed to the discussion as Random Juju).

I've tried manually editing the bootloader configuration from the Ubuntu
installer, but that does no good, since yaboot can't be fooled into
swapping the IDE channels in order to bless a drive/partition.  I've
tried doing the same from a Gentoo LiveCD, and had much better luck.
The kernel will load and perform some basic initialization tasks, but
the same error occurs somewhere around "Booting Ubuntu Linux..." (I
don't have the exact line available).  This leads me to believe that the
installation process places a reference to "hdc" somewhere in the
initrd, but I don't know how to check or fix that manually.

Thanks for your help!  I hope to get this figured out well enough to (a)
get Ubuntu running and (b) to file a useful bug report.

-Jon