I've looked around before posting and this sounds like a fairly common problem in one form or another with no solution. Hopefully one of you can help.

I recently installed arch 64 on my laptop, which is duel booting Windows.

I just had the core utilities plus a few other random things installed when I decided to upgrade and reconfigure the kernel. I Upgraded from the arch default 3.0 to 3.0.4 using the config in the /proc directory. I didn't really change much. Basicly I just adjusted for my processor and pulled out some modules I know I wouldn't use (nothing to do with sata support).

after copying the new kernel and system map to my boot directory, making an image and updating grub, I rebooted. It begins to load but then gives this message.
I've tried quite a few things to fix this A lot of posts suggested it was a problem with mkinitcpio so I tried reimagaging the default file and it worked perfectly. I would have tried recompiling it but it didn't come with any source.

I have also tried removing autodetect from the mkinitcpio config fileand manually defining partitions at boot with no luck

has anyone ever seen this?

My partitions are laid out as such

sda1 windows recovery NTFS
sda2 windows boot NTFS
sda3 windows NTFS
sda4 extended
sda5 arch boot ext4
sda6 arch root ext4
sda7 swap swapfs

An initcpio is its own source. Check the (normally very good) Arch wiki for how to extract it.
My question to you is: if you are building your own kernel, why are you using an initrd at all ?.

I'm rather new to this so I'm blindly following directions.
I figured I would try to shrink it in stages and see if it works.


So. I'll lookup extracting that source.
But since I already went this far. I would like to successfully upgrade the kernel.
Are you suggesting that the proper way to do this is to remove everything but my hardware and then install the kernel without mkinitcpio

I guess that makes sense. But surprisingly I haven't seen this advice in any tutorial I have referenced.

No, I'm not suggesting that.
An initrd is only required to ensure all resources needed to mount the (final) root are available prior to the root actually being mounted.
So you only need to build in what is required to mount the root - the others can either be deferred or built-in. Used to be a pain to do this manually, but now the make has options to help - search here for "localyesconfig" for example.

So I used localyesconfig, along with a couple other adjustments and it appears to be working good without initrd. It is difficult to tell since there is not a whole lot on the system yet.
One question I had about localyesconfig, is there there were about a dozen or so options it asked me about. Most of them seemed to be related to individual chips on my video card or something to do with my power supply. I said yes to nearly all of them because I don't want to pull out something that would inhibit battery functionality. I ended up with a 7.3M kernel, which seems reasonable. should I just leave it that way or is there a resource to find more detail about my hardware?

Also, My laptop has an Nvidia 310M, (Yes, I am well aware that it sucks.) Anyway, I removed all frame buffer graphics like nouveau from the kernel and installed closed source drivers. Should I expect any problems?
So far everything seems fine however I have not install Xorg yet.