panic during boot: 2.5.53 on alpha

[Jason Papadopoulos]

Hello. I'm a 2.5 newbie, and hopefully someone can tell me what I'm doing wrong here.

Turning off module support lets the 2.5.53 kernel compile on an Alpha, but
when booting on a DS10 the kernel claims that the argument to "root=" is
invalid, fails to mount the root filesystem, and panics. 

The 2.2 and 2.4 kernels all worked fine with "root=/dev/hda3". The machine
has a single IDE drive; /boot is mounted on hda1, /tmp on hda2, and / on hda3.
The gzipped vmlinux and System.map are both in /boot.

There were some patches for 2.5.52 posted last week for Alpha, but most of the
patch contents were to enable module support which I don't care about at the
moment. 

Apologies if this is a known issue, or if it's just something dumb that I'm doing. I can provide my config file if anyone's interested.

Thanks in advance,
jasonp