Yes, this is normal since most disk drivers have been migrated to libata instead of ide/pci, and therefore appear as scsi-disks. You are supposed to use root=UUID=... in grub's #kopt setting in order to be independent on hardware device path.
If the kopt setting was not changed automatically, it was a bug in grub, which is (currently) doing the conversion. ** Changed in: linux-source-2.6.20 (Ubuntu) Status: Unconfirmed => Rejected -- Booting problem: kernel recognizes SCSI instead of IDE https://launchpad.net/bugs/76194 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs