I have Redhat 9 currently installed, and for some reason my mobo (ASUS P4T-E) doesn't like the floppy driver being built into the kernel, so I had to rebuild it making it a module, however the source for kernel 2.4.20-19.9 that comes with RH 9 won't recompile, keeps giving me errors that header files are missing. So I downloaded 2.4.21 from kernel.org and attempted to compile it, which I was able to do, however at boot time it doesn't like it, here is my grub.conf

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You do not have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /, eg.
# root (hd0,1)
# kernel /boot/vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hdb2
# initrd /boot/initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hdb
default=2
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,1)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Red Hat Linux (2.4.20-19.9)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.20-19.9 ro root=LABEL=/ hda=ide-scsi
initrd /boot/initrd-2.4.20-19.9.img
title Linux (2.4.21)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/bzImage vga=791 root=/dev/hdb2 read-only
title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

for some reason my linux partition /dev/hdb2 is not being recongnized, it has been extremely frustrating, and I don't know if it is seeing it at boot time, all I see is my cdrom hdc and my zip hdd, and I have built ide support into the new kernel. please help...

-Frustrated 5 year newbie

you didn't specify the path to initrd for linux 2.4.21 and you say your cdrom is hdc, so why are you passing hda=ide-scsi? and are you running /sbin/grub-install after making changes?

as for the initrd is that a must have? It's just a ram disk right? The first kernel was installed for me by the redhat installer, I have no clue why it is passing hda=ide=scsi I just left it as is, being that it boots properly, again I'm still very much a newbie, why would the rh installer put that there?

you've just got bzimage down for your kernel file?
Is that what you compiled it too?

this is my current Grub entry for linux.

title GNU/Linux 2.4.21-sorsha
root (hd0,4)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.21-sorsha1 root=/dev/hda6 vga=10 /dev/hdd=ide-scsi

if you CD to /boot and look around there should be a vmlinuz a system.map and possibly a config file with version that match your new compiled version.

I also have no initrd. the ide-scsi bit is for CDRW's