Ok, I'm trying to upgrade my kernel to the latest version in order to get support for the ISD-200 USB/ATA Bridge (for a portable harddrive/mp3player). I've tried several times unsuccessfully. Here's what I did.
1. Downloaded the sources and unpacked them in /usr/src/
2. I created a config file with menuconfig(xconfig wouldn't work).
3. make dep
4. make clean
5. make bzImage
6. renamed the image to vmlinux-2.5.9 and copied it to /boot
7. make initrd
8. copied the initrd to /boot as well.
9. edited Grub by keeping the copying the old image and inserting the image and the initrd in the appropriate places.

When I reboot and select the new kernel, It starts up and then all of a sudden I get a Kernel Panic error. I tried it several times. I don't need to upgrade to 2.5.9, but I need to get the ISD-200 support. Could anyone tell me where I've gone wrong or point me to some good resources? Please??

2.5.x kernels are unstable and are really for the developers fixing and testing the kernel, you know for the big boys like Linus, Alan and the rest. You might just want to hold off til they are fully done unless you want to be doing some debugging yourself.

Thanks for your help. I didn't realize that they were that unstable. I had updated through redhat last night to 2.4.18-4. I checked the config file this morning and noticed that the isd-200 is built in this version. Everything works fine. This thing (archos 20 Jukebox recorder) is really cool if anyone was thinking of getting one.

kernel.org:
surely that was where you got the source from in the first place?

I haven't ever heard of make initrd? What does that do? What is initrd?

how about you look at your man pages?

ha ha ha, Damn! Ok, no problem. I am at work on WinNT, where can I find a man page?

http://www.linuxhq.com/kernel/v2.4/doc/initrd.txt.html

An answer to my question. This still doesn't help me. What happens when you execute make initrd?

http://man.linuxquestions.org/index....ction=0&type=2
of course

Hey cool, I didn't know the man pages were on here. Hmm, gonna have to figure out how to get there.

Thanks

<edit>Wow it must be early/late. http://man.linuxquestions.org will probably get me there. Thanks again </edit>

ok so i ran make initrd but it returned with: no rule to make target 'initrd' . Stop.

Why?