FC3 can't find LVM volumes, boot fails, kernel panics

[Deron Meranda]

> One option is to unpack the initrd that gets built by mkinitrd, add the
> required modules, modify the init script to reflect your changes, then
> pack it back up replacing the faulty initrd.
> 
> I never tried this so I don't know if there is anything else done by
> mkinitrd that would be required. You could try it and see what happens.

SOLVED.
Yes, I thought about manually inserting it into the initrd image....
but I finally solved the problem just before resorting to that!  Yea! 
Everything is running fine, yum updates applied, running latest SMP
kernel, and no data was lost.  And I sure learned a lot more about the
inner workings of the kernel loading process.


It turns out that my /etc/modprobe.conf was wrong.  That modprobe file
was the same as it was under FC2; apparently the upgrade did not
attempt to change/repair it.  The modprobe.conf file has these two
lines (among others):

   alias scsi_hostadapter aix7xxxx
   alias scsi_hostadapter1 megaraid

However there is no "megaraid" driver in FC3.  There are
"megaraid_mbox" and "megaraid_mm", but no plain "megaraid".  This is
what was causing mkinitrd to fail.

Was this perhaps a change between FC2 and FC3?

So, I don't know if this was because of a FC2 to FC3 upgrade problem
or not?  I'll do some more poking around, and may then go visit
bugzilla to see if there is a report, and if not make one.

Thanks for everybody who gave me some hints.

And thanks Fedora crew for the amazingly useful Rescue CD!
-- 
Deron Meranda