The `new' ide driver that was introduced in the 2.0 kernel series has
one possible problem:  If you have a large hard drive (> 1gb) that is
not recognized fully by your slightly older PC bios, and you are using
the disk manager Dos utility to format and partition this hard drive,
then the Linux ide driver will find the entire hard drive with its
partitions, but will generate some kind of error during the Linux
bootup process.

There is a point in recent Linux rc.S scripts where you call
        /sbin/mount -avt nonfs
and either continue or invoke login depending on the error return. With
an older bios, mount will return an error and drop you into login, even
though the system works just fine anyway.