trouble installing slack 11 on thinkpad z60m

[HackerzMaster]

hello everyone, it´s been a while!

i got myself a laptop ( a thinkpad z60m )and im having a problem in installing slackware 11 on it,
the harddisk is a sata one, reiserfs root on /dev/hda4
installed normally but for the wireleess to work as well as other stuff i had to upgrade to 2.6 kernel series, particularly the generic-2.6.17.13 version, so i installed the one on the cd, along with the modules, headers. booted into it and it hanged during boot giving this message:

VFS: cannot open root device ¨hda4¨ or unknown-block (0,0)
please append a correct ¨root=¨ boot option
kernel panic - not syncing : VFS: unable to mount root fs on unkown-block (0,0)

So i thought maybe i should append /dev/sda4 as root device since its a sata harddisk but it gave me an error at boot:

no filesystem could mount root, tried ext2
kernel panic - not syncing : VFS: unable to mount root fs on unkown-block (8,4)

I even made an initrd which loads reiserfs and still gives me the same error.

so far th 2.4 kernel works, except it hangs on hotplug so chmod -x it by a boot cd, but i have to upgrade to 2.6 to be able to load the ipw2200 module for my wireless NIC.
i use grub to dual-boot with windows.

Am i missing something? any help is appreciated.

thanks