[olug] *urgent* Suse 9.1 pro boot issue (md related?)

[Eric Penne]

I believe that my Suse installation is hosed.  This is my main work
computer.  I don't want to spend another 8 hours reinstalling Suse and
CXOffice and MSOffice.

I get to a point where it says "Waiting for /dev/0 to appear...not found."
Then is lists all the mount points that are valid and says "dropping to
/bin/sh"  and that is as far as it goes.

Specs:
Laptop P3 1GHz Dell
20GB hda
   hda1 50 MB fat32 (bootable)
   hda2 500MB swap
   hda3 18 GB lvm
   hda4 50 MB ext2 /boot
DVD hdb
4 GB hdc
   hdc1 fat32 win2k install

hda4 is physically in "front" of hda3.  Originally all I had was hda1 for
swap and hda2 for /boot but win2k wanted a small partition on the first
drive for its boot files.

The lvm is 2GB usr 2GB root 5GB home 2GB opt 2GB var

I do not think that I use md devices.  I'm not sure what they are but I
think they are raid related.

I spent all yesterday trying to get win2k on the second hard drive.  I had
to break up my hda and move stuff around to get win2k to boot.  When I was
done I had to boot into rescue mode and redo my lilo config.  It worked. 
I booted into linux and all was good again.  I then rebooted into Win2k to
test it.  I rebooted again to go back to Linux and i received the "waiting
to exhale.." message from above. I hit "ctrl alt delete" and it says
"Stopping md devices" and then it reboots.

Google searches for "suse waiting for /dev to appear" talk about changing
from kernel 2.6.4 to 2.6.5 with YOU.  They also talk about /dev/900
pointing to /dev/md0 but my error isn't /dev/  I did that but have booted
into linux many times since then.

Is it possible that the /dev/md is somehow blocking my startup?  Is there
a way to disable the md with a kernel parameter at startup?

Thanks
Eric Penne