2.4 -ac kernels with Adrian Bunk's potato packages?

[Fred Gray <fegray@npl.uiuc.edu>]

Earlier today, Adrian Bunk announced an update to his package collection 
that allows 2.4.x kernels to be used on a potato system.  Our research group
thanks him very much for this work, which has made our lives easier on 
several occasions now.

For various reasons, I would like to set up a 2.4.13-ac4 (Alan Cox's tree)
kernel-image package with the same highly modular structure as Adrian's 
package of Linus's tree (using an initrd to load modules that are necessary
at boot time).  We have a cluster of machines with widely varying hardware,
and this structure lets us run a consistent kernel on all of them.

I did an "apt-get source kernel-source-2.4.13" to download the 2.4.13 kernel 
with the Debian patches applied.  I extracted the configuration file from the
output of "apt-get source kernel-image-2.4.13-686-smp".  I applied the -ac4
patch on top of this kernel source tree, cleaned up the few conflicts by hand,
and used "make oldconfig" to answer the new configuration questions. 
I removed the file debian/official in order to avoid complaints about the
version number, and I ran "make-kpkg binary".  I installed the kernel-image
package, built a new initrd image, and ran lilo.

However, when I try to boot this new kernel, the boot fails with the following
messages:

[...]
RAMDISK: cramfs filesystem found at block 0
RAMDISK: Loading 3332 blocks [1 disk] into ram disk... done.
Freeing initrd memory: 3332k freed
cramfs: wrong magic
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 01:00

Can someone offer a suggestion on what might have gone wrong?  (Please cc
me on replies, since I'm not subscribed to this list.)

Thanks very much for your help,

-- Fred Gray