[LBo] Kernel eide v. scsi

[Geoff Jones]

I have an old amd duron 800 box with 2 eide drives - running debian testing.
I recently did a kernel upgrade from 2.6.18-4 to 2.6.21-2.

The newer kernel seems to read the drives as scsi and will only boot with a 
grub [ menu.lst ] entry of "root=/dev/sda3". This invalidates my "/etc/fstab" 
file as it is written in terms of "hda" and "hdb".
The older kernel still boots with "root=/dev/hda3". 

Although I have done the Rute + Intro-linux courses, the kernel remains
a bit of a mystery to me.
I would appreciate it if someone could tell me why the newer kernel acts in 
this way + how I could rectify it ?