initrd woes

[Maria McKinley <maria@shadlen.org>]

Greetings,

I hope this is the correct place to post my question. Please let me know 
if there is a more appropriate place, as I have not posted to debian 
before and wasn't sure what list to use. I am attempting to boot over 
the network (Debian Lenny Linux version 2.6.26), using nfs or the root 
directory. The kernel boots up fine, but then fails during initrd with 
the following message:

run-init: /sbin/init: No such file or directory

I have stuck some debugging statements in my initrd, and have determined 
the following:

This is the exact command that is failing:

exec run-init ${rootmnt} ${init} "$@" <${rootmnt}/dev/console
  >${rootmnt}/dev/console

which translates to:
exec run-init /root /sbin/init </root/dev/console >/root/dev/console

I stuck in some echo statements and verified that /root/sbin/init and
/root/dev/console both exist, and if I change the options of exec
run-init I can get it to complain about incorrect syntax, so it seems to
be able to find the command okay. Furthermore, if I change the above 
command to

exec run-init ${rootmnt} ${rootmnt}${init} "$@" <${rootmnt}/dev/console
  >${rootmnt}/dev/console

it also fails, stating that /root/sbin/init does not exist, however on 
the line just before I can print out ls -l /root/sbin/init and I get this:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 0    0 37384 Aug 12 14:20 /root/sbin/init

So I have no idea why I am getting the message that init does not exist. 
Can anyone give me any advice on how to proceed with troubleshooting?

thanks,
maria