so i have been trying for quite a while to change the resolution of my command line using, amongst other things, the rdev command.
to make a long story short i finally realized that what i had to do was:

$ rdev -v /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.22-1.2199.nptl -3

and while doing that, for the hell of it i also did

$ rdev -v /boot/initrd-2.4.22-1.2199.nptl.img -3

(i had been working on this for a while and thought i would save time by testing both at once)

which was not so smart.

now when i boot, my computer crashes and the caps and scroll lock lights flash and i get an error something along the lines of

"could not mount kernel at 00:00"

___________________________________________________________

so, with nothing else to do, and not really knowing what i was doing, i tried changing my grub conf
i changed

vmlinuz-2.4.22-1.2199.nptl
and
initrd-2.4.22-1.2199.nptl.img

to

vmlinuz-2.4.22-1.2115.nptl
and
initrd-2.4.22-1.2115.nptl.img

which i had happened to notice were also in the /boot dir.
___________________________________

so my question is, can/how can i recover my initrd-2.4.22-1.2199.nptl.img without knowing the original value of the offset 506? (the offset that rdev uses to change the video mode)

and also, what are the consequences of using the 2115 image instead of the 2199 image?

i would really appreciate any help on this one.

The 2115 image is an earlier version of the kernel. If all of your devices work, you shouldn't have a problem, however you might want to update the kernel to get a newer version which may contain security patches.
I use a vga=791 option in lilo to decrease the size of the fonts on the virtual terminals. This option need a framebuffer, however the options that the ask option provides look too ugly to me and are hard to read. One added benefit is the ability to use the 'links' web brower in the vt and display graphics also (although this command needs to be compiled with graphics enabled). The mplayer program can also play videos in the terminal.
I don't know why the rdev command you used didn't work, however it could be that you need a version of rdev to match the kernel, but I'm not sure about that. I do believe this may be the case between a 2.4 version kernel and a 2.6 version.

The rdev command works by overwriting the contents of binary files at certain offsets. By its nature it can be a dangerous command, and since it caused damage once, the lesson is not to use it.

it doesn't install anything and your computer boots up nice in X from the live CD

Wannes

thank you both for your help. i am now less worried, but it does bring up a few more questions.

wannessmet: is using knoppix going to help me in any way, either than allowing to boot my computer? because i can boot fine, except it is from an older kernel is all. (i was conserned a first, but jschiwal asured me it was good)

is there any grub equivilent to the vga command in lilo? (im using grub)

how can i go about upgrading my kernel to the newest one? (im using fedora core 1)

just another thought,

what are the chances that someone with the same os [fedora core 1] and kernel version, could run

vidmode /path/to/their/initrd-2.4.22-1.2199.nptl.img

to see what the value is (this command does nothing except report the present value) and then i could change mine back to that an it would work?