@TP, yes it does appear that way. I had an issue last week when I made those partitions, I didn't realize that the system thought it was 1998. The partitions are clean, I just haven't bothered to fsck them. It's on the todo list. As regards the mounting, I'd rather do it with scripts than boot codes, as it is easier to back up my work, and requires fewer seconds typing at boot.
@rich, yes, irqpoll by itself does not work. cat /proc/cpuinfo shows only one 1400 mhz pentium 3. With no lapic flag. Which I gather (from other sources) is a problem, since lapic is the subsystem that governs the multiple processors? Also, cat /proc/interrupts shows that ide 0 and 1 (the ide raid controller with drives set to spare pool) is irq 10, and that ide 3 and 4 are irqs 14 and 15 respectively. Doesn't seem to be any problem there.
I'll try acpi_pm_good
EDIT:
acpi_pm_good doesn't appear to have any effect. Neither does manually invoking lapic. I was pretty sure it was already on, and that wasn't the reason, but I had to make sure.