Hi all,

I made a pretty big mess. I had a working 2.6.13 kernel but I wanted to install 2.6.17.11 and customize it. When I tried o make a initrd with
mkinitrd -c -k 2.6.17.11 -m reiserfs

and tried to boot, it went into kernel panic: it couldn't mount the filesystem. Even worse, I think it messed up existing initrd for the 2.6.13 kernel so I can't boot either new or old kernel; I don't know what to do now. I booted from CD and tried mkinitrd but it doesn't work for either new or old kernel. Also I tried recompiling again from scratch but it doesn't work either. How can I fix this mess? I don't care so much about installing anew kernel, I just want to be able to boot again. I guess I should've studied a little bit what does mkinitrd do in the first place, cause now I am completely lost. Thanks for your help.

My attempt to fix this would be installing a new system to a spare partition, then copy the necessary files from /boot to the broken
system, making necessary adjustments in /boot/grub/menu.lst or /etc/lilo.conf regarding partition numbers, then reboot into the
old system...

you forgot to put where the root partition when creating initrd
try boot using cd 1 and re-create the initrd using
it's better to give unique name for each initrd so it won't overwrite your working initrd using -o <output-initrd>

You remembered to edit lilo.conf, run lilo -t, then (if no errors)lilo before trying to boot the new kernels right?

To answer your other question, when kernels have the file systems built as modules, the initrd will preload the modules for ext3, reiserfs, etc. so the system knows how to read the fs / is mounted on. You used to have to do this with scsi drives and 2.4 kernels as well IIRC.