drive failure

[Alan Cox]

> During a boot from the FU8 dvd, this drive enumerates itself as /dev/sda which 
> I don't understand because its interface is on a jmicron pci pata card, not 
> on the motherboard.

That simply means it was the first disk found.

> During this same 'rescue' boot, I did a chroot /mnt/sysimage from the shell it 
> gave me, then tried to fdisk /dev/sda.  No /dev/sda device found!  Do an 
> ls /dev, and its empty!  Something is broken in the rescue mode folks.

Its in /dev not in the chroot. You could mount the /dev of the rescue
disk over the chroot if you wanted and then chroot.

You disk however should at the point the rescue shell appears
be /dev/sdsomething.