[lug] ATA driver question

[Zulaware]

This is more of an academic question, since we're moving to a SuSE 
distro w/ ATA driver built-in, but I'm curious.

I was forced to use an older 2.2.x kernel [long sad story deleted] on 
RH7.3 with ATA drives, which worked fine under all tests. The driver was 
from Silicon Images and had to be provided on disk during install (and 
recovery) using the "dd" option. The problem came when I upgraded the 
kernel to whatever RedHat Network provided. Upon reboot, it had a kernel 
panic trying to mount any partitions.

Is the driver somehow attached to the kernel when using dd? or is it a 
kernel incompatibility with the drivers? If I were to go back to this 
configuration (which I'm not) would I have to reinstall the 3rd party 
driver for the new kernel, and how is that done?

--Michael Wegener