System: Gentoo on AMD Athlon XP 1800+, Radeon 9600Pro. 512MB

Pleeeeeeeeease help me :-)

I was running kernel 2.6.3 and decided to upgrade to 2.6.7. I did "make xconfig && make bzImage && make modules && make modules_install" then copied bzImage to /boot/bzImage-2.6.7. I copied the 2.6.3 entry in LILO and replaced 2.6.3 with 2.6.7. Obviously, it didn't work because I was missing an initrd. So I loaded back into 2.6.3 and used Gentoo's "genkernel initrd" to create a new initrd. IT OVERWROTE MY initrd-2.6.3! So I gave it --basedir=/usr/src/linux-2.6.7 and it outputted /boot/initrd-2.6.7. I changed my lilo and rebooted. "Kernel panic"...said something about there being a problem with RAMDISK (that's initrd, right?).

I tried going back to 2.6.3 but the new initrd is messed up too and I get a Kernel panic there too. I know now that I should have just done "make" to generate the proper initrd but now I'm stuck with no operational kernel. How can get back into my system? How can I recompile a proper initrd-2.6.7 from outside the system? From Knoppix?

I'd REALLY appreciate any help. I'm forced to use Windows in the mean time and it's eating away at me :-) THANK YOU for your help.

--Mitchua

chroot into Gentoo from knoopix, delete the files in /boot, clean the kernel sources, and this time compile it correctly?, then remake the initrd , configure and run lilo, and see if ti works?

(and when did it say there was a ram-disk problem, before or after kernel loaded, and before or after init loaded? ... and what do you need the initrd for anyways? (if its just for smelting fancy you can try booting without the initrd))

AH, gotcha. I'll try it right now. Thank you!

It went through the drive detection then entered into a series of errors about ramdisk, hard drive, invalid init=, etc. before finally saying "Kernel panic".

I'm having problems running lilo from Knoppix. I copied my lilo.conf to /etc/lilo.conf (on the Knoppix ramdisk) and ran "lilo -M /dev/hda6" but I just get Fatal: creat /boot/boot.0300: No such file or directory. How do I write the new lilo?

Thanks again.

Found the answer myself.

From the Knoppix cmd prompt:
su
mount -o bind /dev /mnt/hda6/dev
chroot /dev/hda6
lilo

I'm back in Linux. Thanks for everyone's help.