Red Hat :: RHEL4 Strange Kernel Panic On Boot - Kernel Update No Solution

I have the following strange thing with a RHEL4 installation. Since last week, the system did a reboot and now something is really fucked up. During boot we get the following messages (don't care about 'strange' typo's, my colleague typed it 'blind' from the screen)

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The strange thing is that we never see a 'could not mount blabla' or similar messages. First we thought it was a failing kernel update by plesk, but even after manually updating the kernel with RHN RPM's, still the same message. Booting with rescue mode and then chroot the system works. After that we even can start things like plesk and so on.

We double checked things with another RHEL4 install, and at least two things were odd:

1: the working machine has /dev/dm-0 and /dev/dm-1, the broken one doesn't

2: some files on /dev didn't have group root, but 252

We tried to recreate the /dev/dm-X nodes with [vgmknodes -v], output:

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A fdisk /dev/sda shows: /dev/sda2 XX XXX XXXXX Linux LVM (I removed the numbers because this line is from another machine, but rest was identical)

We have a copy of the boot partition so if one need more info please let me know.

grub.conf:

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last part of init extracted from initrd-2.6.9-78.0.8.ELsmp.img:

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