Kernel panic after PC upgrade

[Shawn Gu <gux grove ufl edu>]

I recently upgrade my PC, new motherboard, CPU, memory, and a new 8.4 Gig
IDE harddisk.  I have an old 3 gig IDE hard disk with Redhat5.1 and Win95
installed.  I set the old disk as master and new one has slave (after
confirming with two other people I have to assume the jumpers are set
correctly), but under BIOS setup and new disk couldn't be detected as
slave and I had to set it has a secondary master, and I don't really know
the difference between them.
When I booted to linux with LILO, it came to a halt with a kernel panic
message:
partition check:
hdb: hdb1 hdb2 <hdb5 hdb6>
hdc: [PTBL][1027/225/63] hdc1 hdc2 <hdc5 hdc6>
hda: media changed
hda: tray open or drive not ready
hda: tray open or drive not ready
hda: tray open or drive not ready
attempt to access beyond end of device
03:05: rw=0, want=2, limit=0
EXT2-fs: unable to read superblock.
hda: tray open or drive not ready
attempt to access beyond end of device
03:05: rw=0, want=2, limit=0
FAT bread failed
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount rootfs on 03:05

It looks like something happened to my old hard disk, which is supposed to
be hda.  I used the rescue disk and used fdisk to look at the partitions,
and I couldn't find hda on the partition table, just hdb and hdc.  And it
said something about 1027 cyclinder is out of bound, more than 1024,
something like that.  Can someone explain the problem and help me out?
Thanks in advance.