Whenever I rebuild my kernel, I always lose some functionality. Either my sound card is gone, or my NIC is no longer recognized or some other function or device is changed. Strangely the behavior is not related to the changes I made in the kernel. For instance, if I enable support for NTFS filesystem, I lose my NIC. What I assume is happening is that when I first run "make xconfig", it is building a default kernel setup. Then when I save and build the kernel, the default settings are applied. Is there a way to have the current setup displayed when I rebuild the kernel? I really don't want to go through every menu item when I only need to change a few items. The only "pre" make command I know of is mrproper and this doesn't seem to help.

Thanks in advance for the help.

Using mrproper will remove your current config and any temp files. Just doing a make xconfig or make menuconfig will display you current configuration, hence you will just be able to change the little bits you need to. What steps are you using to build the kernel?

cheers

Jamie...

The steps I typically use are:

make xconfig
make dep
make clean
make bzImage
make modules
make modules_install
copy new kernel to /boot
edit lilo.conf and run lilo and lilo-q

I've never had any problems building, compiling, or installing the kernel. It just seems that the first time I do this, areas of the kernel that I don't touch during the make xconfig phase get changed and I end up going back thru the kernel config line by line by line...

It looks like you are forgetting System.map.

cp /usr/src/linux/System.map /boot/System.map