It seems that even though I'm starting up cardmgr in the initrd, which sucessfully finds hde and hde1, upon finishing the initrd (closing the shell or end of linuxrc), the kernel doesn't find hde1. Could this be to do with my 2.6 kernel not having devfs. I have fired up udevstart though, although I'm not 100% sure what I'm doing, the device nodes are being created.
Where did you get your initrd from? Custom built or script generated? Functional root filesystems can be a bit tricky to get right.
-- Richard A. Smith