I've got a Sarge install on my nForce2-based system. The stock 2.4 kernel works OK, as does the stock 2.6.8 kernel. However, when I try to build a customised kernel, the following occurs:

I create the kernel as usual

and install it as usual

(OK, I'm going from memory on the *exact* name I gave the image). This adds the entry to Grub quite happily, so I reboot, see the new kernel entry, and select it. However, the boot process doesn't get very far. After uncompressing the kernel, and examining the RAM map, I tget the following status messages:

and then stops with no further messages. If, as others have suggested, I add acpi=off to the boot process, then I get even less!

and again stops permanently.

Now given that the stock 2.6.8 kernel boots just fine, I'm surmising that I've removed something vital from the kernel configuration, but can't figure out what - diff'ing two 30K config files produces a huge list which would take days to go through adding stuff back in, compiling, rebooting etc, Does anyone have any suggestions?

You could try just recompiling the stock kernel (eg. using the exact same config) to see if there is
something else wrong with your kernel installation process.

Well blow me - it does exactly the same thing then as well. I copied the config file from the working stock 2.6.8 kernel from the /boot directory into /usr/src/linux, and loaded that. The exact commands I used after copying in the config file were:

This time the boot processes freezes terminally when it gets to the line

which as ToniT suggests, is a definite pointer that there is something wrong at compile-time, perhaps a package missing that the compiler neglects to mention. I installed kernel-source, libncurses5, and kernel-package. Anything obviously missing?

So in the end I decided "Sod it", wiped the installation, installed afresh, compiled a new kernel, and this time the darn thing worked. Truly a Windows experience...