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.