FC4 2.6.14 boot problems

[M. Barnabas Luntzel]

Ever since I was upgraded (by smart) to 2.6.14, I have not been able  
to boot any of these kernels. vmlinuz-2.6.13-1.1532_FC4 works fine so  
I've at least had a working system. vmlinuz-2.6.14-1.1656_FC4 as well  
as vmlinuz-2.6.14-1.1653_FC4 bomb out on boot with these messages:


Booting 'Fedora Core (2.6.14-1.1656_FC4)'

root (hd0,0)
Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.14-1.1656_FC4 ro root=LABEL=/ quiet
[Linux-bzimage, setup=0x1e00, size=0x178b66]
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.14-1.1656_FC4.img
[Linux-initrd @ 0x37ec7000, 0x128125 bytes]

Uncompressing Linux... OK, booting the kernel.
Red Hat nash version 4.2.15 starting
mkrootdev: label / not found
mount: error 2 mounting ext3
ERROR opening /dev/console!!!!: 2
error dup2'ing fd of 0 to 0
error dup2'ing fd of 0 to 1
error dup2'ing fd of 0 to 2
switchroot: mount failed: 22
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

is this some sort of udev problem? I've googled this to death and I  
cant find any resolution. tried giving different parameters to the  
boot line to no effect.
explicitly setting root=/dev/sda1 did not work. it's an SATA  
drive...what gets me is that 2.6.13 worked fine, but any 2.6.14 is  
borked. so that indicates to me that the label on the disk is fine.  
the boot parameters for my 2.6.13 are identical.

perhaps support for my SATA controller was removed? it seems  
doubtful. SiL 3114 SATA Raid PCI card. The difference between the 13  
and 14 boot seems to be at the line right after "Red Hat nash version  
4.2.15 starting". the 13 gets to INIT, and the 14 bombs on mkrootdev.  
It also seems less likely that ext3 support was taken out of  
2.6.14 :)...I'm a little nervous about removing udev as it seems  
2.6.13 uses it and I'd like to have a somewhat working system.

thanks for any help and sorry if I've left any important information  
out.