Am running Slack 10 with 2.6.7 kernel.

I've always mounted my compact flash reader on /dev/sda1, but when I tried
that on Slack 10 it said something like: /dev/sda1, no such file. And sure
enough there was no such file. Google provided an answer, but not an
explanation of why sda1 is missing. (The answer being to run mknod in
rc.local or someplace like that.)

What's interesting is if I have a compact flash card in the reader, and
then re-boot, something creates /dev/sda1 for me, but I can't figure out
if it's rc.udev, rc.hotplug, or something else. Wasn't there a script
called MAKEDEV that created all these device nodes? It doesn't seem to be
used on Slack 10, instead they seem to be created as needed depending on
what hardware is present. So what's going on here? Anyone else run into
this?

thanks much