Installed a new kernel for a Debian machine. The commands for that are
apt-get install linux-image-2.6.16-2-686
apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.16-2-686
The headers were needed to install the Nvidia drivers for my video card. After the system rebooted I did not have access to my DVD drive. A hint on why it did not initalize was found in the dmesg which said "ata2(0): WARNING: ATAPI is disabled, device ignored". So to get it working again I had to put a line in the modprobe section in /etc/. The command to do this is
echo options libata atapi_enabled=1 >> /etc/modprobe.d/libata
Then you have to remake the initrd image so it loads on boot with the command
dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-`uname -r`
After reboot it should work just fine and is known as device /dev/sr0.
The other thing that installing a new kernel from a Debian package does wrong is it chooses the wrong device as my root mount point. It chooses the old "root=/dev/hda5 ro" line which is for PATA drives but for SATA drives it has to look like "root=/dev/sda5 ro". That one little change from letter "h" to "s" makes the system go from hanging on boot to booting right up. Make those changes in the /boot/grub/menu.1st file.
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