I just installed redhat 8.0 on my HP ZE5170 laptop. I compiled the 2.4.20 kernel and when I try to boot it I get the error "no init found. try passing init= option to kernel" I am booting from grub and I have tried everything that I can think of.

Did you run make install , or did you move the bzImage to /boot by yourself?

If you didn't make install , then you'll prob'ly need to run mkinitrd kernel_version to create the initrd. That's the INITial RamDisk, and is used to boot. Check the man page to see what options there are to mkinitrd.

I ran the make install feature but that doesn't move the bzImage to the /boot. I had to do that manually. Their is a file initrd-2.4.20.img in /boot

Well, then, it could be something in your GRUB configuration. Post your /boot/grub/grub.conf for us to look for any problems.

How do you have your menu.lst set up? It could be the same problem I had a while back when I forgot how grub counts its hard drives. If you have only the one drive (hda) then is it possible it was setup as hd1,0 whereas the grub equivalent should be set as hd0,0

Here is the grub.conf file
grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
# root (hd0,0)
# kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hda2
# initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hda
default=1
timeout=30
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Red Hat Linux (2.4.20)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20 ro root=LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi nomce
initrd /initrd-2.4.20.img
title Red Hat Linux (2.4.18-14)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.18-14 ro root=LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi nomce
initrd /initrd-2.4.18-14.img

I just changed one line of the file to
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20 ro root=LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi nomce
ide=nodma idebus=66
That fixed the kernel panic but now it says that that hda is not ready for command.!?!

Making progress but still not there