[vox-tech] ramdisk error booting Gentoo Linux

[Matt Holland]

Hey all, has anyone seen an error like this before?

Gentoo Linux; http://www.gentoo.org
  Copyright 2001 Gentoo Technologies, Inc.; Distributed under the GPL

  * Mounting /proc...				[ok]
  * Starting devfsd...				[ok]
  * Mounting ramdisk 0 at /mnt/.init.d...      [oops]

  * the "dd" command failed with error:

1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out

  * Since this is a critical task, startup cannot continue.

Give root password for maintenance
(or type Control-D for normal startup):

This is on a new Gentoo Linux system that I built... er, almost built. 
I suspect that I may have screwed something up in the kernel build 
(something involving ramdisk support?), or maybe just in configuring 
Grub.  I'm using a custom compiled version 2.2.20 kernel, because I have 
an old ATAPI cd-rom that can't seem to mount media under 2.4 kernels. 
That's a little nonstandard for Gentoo, so it's possible that I followed 
all of the instructions correctly, but that the instructions were 
wrong... pardon the rambling.

In any case, I'm wondering if anyone has seen a problem like this after 
compiling a new kernel; if so, any idea what's causing it?  A newsgroup 
search didn't turn up anything helpful (or even relevant), so I thought 
I'd let you guys take a crack at it before turning to gentoo-user.

Thanks,
Matt