Hubert Feyrer writes:
 > > My recollection is that this is a symptom of too small a memory disk
 > > in the install kernel.  Is that the case?
 > 
 > I doubt it. If the amount of reserved memory in the kernel was too small 
 > for the ramdisk to insert, mdsetroot would complain during building of the 
 > ramdisk+kernel (done in the 'instkernel' dir).

You seem to be right.  There are no errors indicated by mdsetroot.

To track this down further, I tried booting just the kernels directly
from a hard disk.  GENERIC_LAPTOP boots fine, whereas INSTALL_LAPTOP
with the filesystem image installed does not.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to track down the problem?  Do I
need to try identical kernels, one with and one without an embedded
filesystem?

Would someone be willing to check out the sources with the date
"2006-07-07 00:00:00 UTC", build the INSTALL_LAPTOP kernel with the
embedded filesystem (I did this with 'build.sh release'), and try to
boot it?

Thanks for your help.

Cheers,
Brook