I tried compiling a kernel from source---I know SuSE officially discourages anything but the standard distro kernel, but I've enjoyed kernels compiled specifically for the machine in the past, and if I want to patch a kernel for whatever reason, I'll need to compile, etc. This machine runs from a scsi bus, so it needs to use initrd during boot if the scsi driver is configured as a module. That's the way the SuSE 6.3 2.2.13 kernel is configured, and that's the way I configured the new one. Naturally, I want to keep my old, working kernel in place as a backup. I need to know how to use mk_initrd, if necessary, to make the ramdisk image for the new kernel, but I need also to know what to do to preserve the /boot/initrd image for my old kernel. SuSE 6.3 came with no documentation on mk_initrd; there's an ancient man page for initrd, from 1997, but it doesn't provide any real help for mk_initrd. Invoking mk_initrd with --help gives "usage: mk_initrd [root_dir]" which doesn't give me much help in supporting two kernels. RedHat's version, called mkinitrd, is significantly different from SuSE's mk_initrd. Maybe it's possible I can use the same /boot/initrd image for all kernels, but so far, I can't seem to make it work---every configuration I've tried ends with a kernel panic: "VFS: Cannot open root device 08:02" which is the root partition on the scsi hard disk. rdev gives the same info for both the old and new kernels. Has anyone successfully compiled (and run) a kernel on a SuSE system? Have you done it in a situation where initrd was necessary? Does anyone have any documentation on mk_initrd? TIA, Jim