Good evening, all! I am pleased to report that I was able to get further error info out of that kernel panic by changing the screen mode so that more text fit, and that this has led to a workaround. All of the following has been reported to Mr. Mantel, but in more detail. E-mail me privately if you'd like a copy of the other messages. In any case, the error is actually an "invalid operand: 000" error on the PCI bus, not a Reiserfs problem as it had originally appeared because of the screen scrolling. The error occurs in /usr/src/linux-2.4.9/include/asm/pci.h at line 180. The error turns out to have been introduced in one of the patches in Mr. Mantel's directory. The workaround is simply to leave out this particular patch. After you've extracted all the patches into a temporary directory, just move file 199_block-himem-all-13-any-2-2.4.10pre1 to another directory or delete it (you can always re-extract it from the tarball). Apply the rest of the patches as directed in the README file. I haven't had time to thoroughly test this, but it was reliably failing to boot before the workaround and is reliably booting after, so I think this is certainly an improvement if not a truly definitive fix. As others on the list have correctly pointed out, this is not yet a production kernel; I'm running it on a non-production test machine and advise that you do the same. :-) Thanks to all who replied to my original post. Regards, Scott -- ------------------------------------------------------------ "I don't mind Microsoft making money. I mind them having a bad operating system." -- Linus Torvalds, in the NY Times Scott Courtney http://www.4th.com/