I have been using Linux for several months now, I have everything working, but there is one problem that is driving me insane....

I started with Redhat and recompiling the kernel was no problem.
I switched to Slackware 7.1. I love it. I had no problem recompiling my kernel. At first.
A few weeks ago I decided that I wanted to slim my kernel down and I recompiled it with no error messages... but it will not boot. I have even gone so far as to reinstall linux, recompile the kernel without making any changes and it still won't reboot. I can copy it to a floppy and it will boot. It seems that I must be making a very simple and blatantly obvious mistake, but after racking my brains for a long time, I haven't found out what it is.

This is the process I go through:
su root;
cd /usr/src/linux;
make xconfig;
(make appropriate changes, or even nothing at all)
(save and exit)
make dep;
make clean;
make bzImage;
mv /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/bzImage /vmlinuz-new
(make changes to /etc/lilo.conf
image = /vmlinuz-new
root = /dev/hda5
label = New )
lilo;
and switch to runlevel 6....

blank screen.

What am I missing??? It seemed so easy before, what am I doing wrong now???? !!!

Are you using kernel modules?? If you are then you missed 'make modules' and 'make modules_install' !! you should do this after you 'make bzImage'

HTH

Stuart

after <make bzImage>...

make modules
make bzlilo (will take care of copying new image,saving old, re-initializing lilo )
make modules_install

you don't need to <make clean> until you have your kernel the way you want it. (bzImage takes much less time, the second, third, forth time thru)

you can come back days, weeks later and cd /usr/src/linux, <make clean> to rid yourself of all the cruft.

You can be lazy on Slackware and other distros that don't put their kernels in /boot and do a that way it copies the kernel and calls LILO for you, one less thing to forget, mind you it doesn't make a backup profile for you...

If you were missing modules I doubt it would cause the kernel to not start at all, just some things wouldn't work. When you say you get a blank screen do you get any disk access etc? Where is LILO being installed to? The MBR? Its worth checking, although this doesn't normally give you a blank screen.

Just a few guesses.

Jamie...

Also, if none of the above works ensure that when you compile your kernel you say yes to support for elf binaries. That tripped me up for a while.

problems with kmod???
 

Well after reading the numerous replies regarding 'bzlilo', I decided to go back and try it again... and it didn't work.I have looked at my lilo configuration so many times that it is forever burned into my brain... and I have been assuming that it was a lilo problem as my kernel compilation was NOT exiting with any error messages... but there wasn't anything that I could see wrong with my lilo config. Everything is as it should be.

I decided to try something else and reinstalled my source tree, yet again, on a whim... I am guessing that when I did this before I was sloppy and I THOUGHT that I hadn't changed anything, but I really had. This time I really didn't and it worked.. I then changed the config one piece at a time until something didn't work and it was kmod...

Has anyone else had any problems with this? It sounds like a nice function to have, but it is apparently what is making my kernel crash.. I am using egcs 2.91.66 on the 2.2.16 kernel. I did turn off a lot in my kernel, but I don't have much in the way of peripherals, and I read EVERY help message before turning anything off. I read kmod.txt and it did have configuration info to get it to behave in certain ways, but nothing about this. Mais c'est la vie...

I've compiled and recompiled about 6 times now and am following these and other walkthru's to the letter but still get the same result. Once i boot to the new config when lilo shows up, it says decompressing kernel or something and freezes forever... no clue..

What can I be missing?

Thanks.

Turns out that the freezing on boot was because in the 'make menuconfig' I didn't choose my processor type correctly. It's the first step and I always overlooked it.

Boots like a charm, now I can tweak it to my liking.

Hope this helps someone else out there.