Installing Alpha Core 2 on Multia

[seafire at ix.netcom.com]

It's been a while since I've needed to do anything with my little machine and 
the hard disk is dying after ~7 years of service (that's after the last hard 
disk died after "only" 4 years). Since the hardware does fine for acting as 
my cable-modem gateway/firewall, I thought I'd try a more modern version of 
Linux for it. Evidently my brain has dumped too much of how to install and/or 
some things have changed I haven't kept up with because of too much machine 
reliability (if there is such a thing). Anyhow, I crank up Milo and try to 
boot and keep getting a kernel panic after it loads the kernel when it tries 
to mount the root file system. I've tried the following perturbations of the 
milo boot command with no success:

milo> boot sr0:kernels/vmlinuz_milo.gz root=/dev/scd0 
initrd=sr0:images/cdrom.img

replacing /dev/scd0 with /dev/sr0 and /dev/cdrom doesn't help nor does leaving 
out the root= option entirely (says cant mount device NULL)

I'm assuming I have to tell milo and the kernel to use the cdrom as my root 
device but I can't figure out what that the correct device nomenclature is. 
I'm using an external SCSI cdrom that says it's device 6 on the chain. I've 
been using an IDE hard disk for my current RH7.1 setup and plan to use a new 
IDE disk since I've had pretty good luck so far. 

I can't help but feel like a n00b asking what parameters to use but I'm stuck 
at this point. I'd appreciate any help from the list...