Gidday,

I have Debian Testing, kernel 2.4.22 running on an IBM Thinkpad R40e. Everything has been working fine with this kernel.

Last week I tried to compile a new 2.4.27 kernel for it like so:

1. make mrproper && make menuconfig
2. Import /boot/config-2.4.22 to kernel configuration.
3. Ensure that my HD controllers and ext2/ext3 are to be compiled directly into kernel.
4. make dep && make bzImage && make modules && make modules_install
5. cp arch/i386/bzImage /boot/bzImage-2.4.27
6. cp System.map /boot/System.map-2.4.27
7. mkinitrd -o /boot/initrd-2.4.27.img 2.4.27
8. Edit /etc/lilo.conf, and rerun /sbin/lilo

The entire linux filesystem (boot, /, /usr, etc) is on /dev/hda3. At step 7, I get an "/etc/modules.conf: No such file or directory" error message. Strange, I'm sure there's supposed to be one there.
So I cp /etc/modules.conf.bak /etc/modules.conf and re-run mkinitrd.
This time it goes without error.

But when I reboot, the kernel gets as far as trying to mount the root filesystem and dies with:
Kernel panic: VFS: unable to mount root fs on 03:03.

According to what I've read, this is mostlly caused by drivers for the hard disk controller not being compiled into the kernel, or likewise for the correct file system, in this case ext3. This is not the case here. Everything required is compiled directly into the kernel.

If I tell lilo not to use the new initrd, and instead point it to the old one, the system does boot, but of course I can't load any modules due to version mismatch. This would suggest that the initrd was not created properly.

any ideas?

thanks,
Greg