well, when I tried making a floppy of the unmodified Red Hat 7.3 boot.img, it apparently tried to start up or look at my cdrom drive because i could hear the noise of the cdrom drive reving up. So it would appear that the modified image is having the problem, either due to some error on my part or due to some problem within the mkbd and mkinit scripts themselves as related to 7.3. I've redone my images a couple of times and even re-downloaded from the red hat site last night and went through the whole process again, so if it's my error, it would have to be one i'm repeating consistently--not impossible, but the directions in the README seem pretty straightforward. Cheryl