I made the mistake of placing system files on a SCSI disk. While this might be a good idea in some circumstances, I would have been better off using my slower IDE boot disk for my system files. This is because I use the machine in question as an image manipulator and archiver. I'd have been better off putting all of my images on SCSI than my /usr directory. Now I have both there.

I got stuck when I installed a stock K7 kernel that did not have a driver for my SCSI board. With both my usr and var directories on a SCSI disk that the kernel could not see, I had problems on boot. I suppose that I could have modified my init files to modprobe initio, but I've always wanted to know how to make kernels for myself.

The Debian page details the reasons to do this better than I can. You did glance at that page, right?