Major screwed up kernel recompile

Hello,

I must have really screwed something up because I attempted to compile the latest 2.4 kernel so I could get XFree 4.3 working in hardware 3D mode with my S3 Savage card. I tried to compile the 2.4-22-xfs kernel that comes with Knoppix, but I get an error about __cmpchg being defined twice. A user on the DRI mailing list suggested I use the latest 2.4 from kernel.org because he thought the error was caused by a Knoppix customization. In any case, the 2.4-24 compiles fine on my computer using the Debian way of 'make-kpkg'. I then install it into lilo and reboot. I choose the new selection Linux2.4-24 and it starts to boot. Everything is proceeding normally but eventually, the screen is flooded with error messages that all say something about fork.c (line 139 I think). I get thrown to a login prompt and logging in as root works, but bash is so badly broken any command I type gives me the same fork.c error message. I notice my computer name is none instead of what it should be so it looks like the boot process breaks down somewhere in the networking part.

I have / on /dev/sdf8 and it is formatted as reiserfs. I have recompiled numerous times trying to compile things into the kernel instead of modules, but I always get the same problem. I have an all SCSI system using two SYmbios 8xx based cards so I compiled this into the kernel. My network is the builtin SIS900 chip on my K7S5A motherboard so I compiled this into the kernel. I know I am missing something stupid, but what is it?

I have no messages to help in /var/log because I assume the system kernel is broken so badly that logging is not operational yet.

Can anyone help me out of my stupidity?

I tried some more things tonight. I compiled without an initrd to have the kernel boot off my reiserfs / partition since I read some people say they had more success this way. This is when I get the jillion error messages about fork.c. They start right after the
INIT version 2.78-knoppix booting message. I am wondering if this is due to not recompiling ash against my new kernel. So I set out to compile ash from Klaus's sources and it will not compile on my machine. It gets stuck trying to compile insmod.c.

So I reran make xconfig and reenabled initrd and then did another make-kpkg clean and make-kpkg --initrd kernel-image modules_image and then installed them with dpkg. I modified lilo.conf to get a second selection kernel 2.4.24 using the new vmlinuz and initrd.2.4.24. Now when the computer boots, it gets past the INIT line and starts to boot but gets hung with this message
Kernel BUG buffer.c2571
invalid operand

I cannot find any reference to this error message anywhere. I found a few references to this type of error but it always pointed to a different line number of buffer.c. So, I am stuck and cannot get either kernel compile method to work. Anyone have any ideas about either getting ash to compile or what might be wrong with the kernel panic during boot?

Thank goodness I have not totally hosed up the original 2.4.22-xfs kernel and I can still boot the machine choosing that in lilo.