I wasn't in the IRC discussion, so apologies if I'm going over old ground. Are you trying to mount your root filesystem from an IDE drive? If so, please note that kernel-image-2.4.18-686 doesn't have IDE support compiled in. I've decided to blame that for my inability to run this kernel, and it could also be to blame for yours.
kernel-image-2.4.18-bf does have IDE support compiled in, but I can't run that either, because it's too big for Loadlin. If you're using a boot-loader other than Loadlin, you might have more luck.
On Tue, 27 May 2003 Jenny_Hopkins@toby-churchill.com wrote:
This is the box which first had a 2.2.18-pre21 kernel which refused stubbornly to upgrade by me building a kernel from a 2.4.19 or 2.4.20 image, however many times I rebuilt it with different tweaks. It wouldn't get past "loading linux" and a bunch of dots.
I reinstalled on this box yesterday from the woody 3.0 disks, using the stock 2.2.20 kernel, then I tried to upgrade last night, this time using the debian apt insta;ll kernel-image-2.4.18-686 thing, - when I rebooted it displayed exactly the same behaviour as above.