Hi Dave and all. I compiled in a 2.4 environment. the debian woody default kernel is 2.2 but i'm not sure about rH3. But the compiling was don in 2.4.19. I've checked the initrd.gz to make sure everything really got there. what happens with the RH floppies, both on my desktop and laptop, is that the first floppy starts fine and I hit enter. the drive goes thumpthump for a while like it should; then there is a pause and one final sound but a bit different from the thumps. Then when i put in the ramdisk, there is one little clunk and nothing more. Cheryl