Why is it that antiX-M8 uses /dev/hda and when I boot the sidux-kernel it wants to use /dev/sda? Same laptop I just wanted to try the smxi script and additional things. I followed the wiki for configuring grub auto updates also.

Because sidux and increasingly most other modern kernels use libata, which sees all drives as /dev/sdx, or /dev/scdx for dvd/cd drives.

it's easy to get around this issue in some places, like menu.lst, by using root=UUID=<uuid> or root=LABEL=<label>

but it's not as easy in others, unfortunately. It's probably best to stick to one or the other, or to use sata drives, which shouldn't have this problem, they should show as /dev/sdx in both cases.

However, systems should be moving away from ever using /dev/sdx syntax in the first place now, because you can never know what disk is detected first so that's an unsafe method in general.

I think there's a howto somewhere here about what to do.