upgrading kernel in VMware Virtual machine of dapper kills the VM

[Mikael Eriksson]

On Wed, Dec 07, 2005 at 12:50:08PM -0500, matt nicholson wrote:
> Not sure which mailing list to post this to so going to both users and 
> devel.
> 
> I have dapper running in a VM on VMware 5.5, breezy as a host. All of 
> the recent Dapper upgrades have gone quite nice thus far, with one 
> exception. When performing the upgrade of linux-image-386(2.6.12.16 to 
> 2.6.15.4) and linux-restricted-modules-386(2.6.12.16 to 2.6.15.4), the 
> VM dies. By this i mean that, upon reboot, Grub comes up, the system 
> starts to boot (the new "handdrawn" usplash comes up), and it gets as 
> far a "Mounting the root file system" After a few seconds here, I get 
> dropped to a console saying:
>  Alert! /dev/sda1/ does not exist. Dropping you to a shell!

I belive I have the same or a similar problem, but on a real comp.
The problem is that sda is sometimes detected as hda, and the root root
will fail to mount because it can't find the device.