Custom boot disk creation help

["Craig Coles" <craig.coles@altiris.com>]

I am trying to create a custom boot disk for a PXE style network boot.
I can take an image of a rescue boot floppy (1.44MB or 2.88MB) and place
this on the PXE server and the PXE client will boot the image, so I know
the server is working...

I am using the following procedure to create the boot disk image;

- create a loopback device to build my root file system in
  dd if=/dev/zero of=myroot bs=1k count=4096
  mke2fs =m 0 -N 2000 myroot
  mount -o loop myroot /mnt
  - create the /dev, /proc, /etc, /sbin, /bin, /lib, /usr, /var
directories
  - create the /dev files
  - populate the /etc, /sbin, /bin, /lib directories...
  ldconfig -r /mnt
  umount /mnt
  dd if=myroot bs=1k | gzip -v9 > myrootfs.gz

- build a kernel (v2.4.20) with ext2 and ramdisk support (8MB), and
other support needed
  make menuconfig
  make dep; make bzImage;

- merge the two steps
  dd if=bzImage of=mybootdisk bs=1k
   788+1 records in
   788+1 records out
  rdev mybootdisk /dev/ram0   (the destination for the root file system
when booted)
  rdev -R mybootdisk 0
  rdev -r mybootdisk 17173    (kernel offset + bit 14 set)
  dd if=myrootfs.gz of=mybootdisk bs=1k seek=789


When this image is booted a Kernel panic is produced: 
VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 01:00

I think that should be the first RAM disk... On the frozen boot screen,
at the top is the message:
RAMDISK driver initialized: 16 RAM disk of 8192K size 1024 blocksize

-- Can anyone tell me what I have done wrong here?  I've rebuilt the
kernel many times to make sure I have everything included, but always
come back to this error.

Thanks for your time,


-Craig