Making a live cd (initrd / kernel panic)

["Patterson, Richard A" <richard.a.patterson@lmco.com>]

On one machine I created a chroot using debootstrap, and put grub
(stage2_eltorito) into it, but I think I'm having trouble with my
initrd.

When I tried just installing the kernel, by default it automatically
tried to run mkinitrd, but I think because I was in my chroot (and not a
real device) it failed.  So before installing the kernel, I installed
the initrd tools, and modified the mkinitrd ROOT variable to be blank.
Now the kernel installs (without an initrd).

So I used (bootcd) mkinitrd-cd to create the initrd inside the chroot.
And then mkisofs and cdrecord the whole thing.

On our target system, I boot to the cd, grub loads, and the kernel
appears to load, but then panics...  Cannot mount root fs on
unknown-block(3,1)

I'm not sure, but I'm afraid that (3,1) coorisponds to the boot
partition of the first machine (where the initrd was created)...

Any clues?  Thanks so much for your help
Rich