SOLVED Debian 3.1 Sarge: Error 432 cannot open dev/console

Yes!!! I managed to find the solution. It was a combination of various issues The first thing there was the change from a traditional dev to udev, after that there was a change in the module that supports the SATA controller of that machine. I solved the problem editing /etc/mkinitrd/files and /etc/mkinitrd/modules in files I added the following lines:

/dev/console
/dev/null
/dev/hdc
/dev/hdc1
/dev/hdc2
/dev/sda
/dev/sda1
/dev/sda2

while in modules it was crucial to add the module

ata_piix

and of course changing the kernel line in /boot/grub/menu.lst to

kernel  /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.8-3-686 root=/dev/sda1 ro

After that I also had to change the / in fstab which was not hdc1 anymore but sda1.

An interesting thing happened; the first time I rebooted the machine fstab was still pointing to hdc1 for root, but the system went up without a glitch. I'm still wondering why... Any suggestions?

PS
Thanx to avij for the brainstorming session