Re: initial setup for newbies

Yes, QEMU would be handy for diagnosing problems.  That would rule out
hardware compat/support problems.

Not finding the root drive sounds like very probably lack of support
for your hard drive controller.

If you want to use your real hardware, you might get an IDE66
controller off of eBay cheap and install on that.  If you have an
on-board IDE controller, using that instead of SATA might work too.

If you boot a recent kernel (eg, on Knoppix or another live CD) and
then post the output of `dmesg` and `lspci`, I (or someone) will
likely be able to tell you whether this is the case that your SATA
controller isn't supported.

Cheers,
-scott

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