Dear Luggers,

I am using Suse Linux 8.2. When I am trying to boot the stock kernel image which came with the distro, by using loadlin (ie. loadlin.exe - from DOS) I get an error message like this,

Uncompressing Linux............

Invalid compress format

--System Halted.

Earlier I had recomplied a new kernel image, and I am able to boot this image with loadlin but unable to do so with the stock kernel of the distro. I had experienced the same problem with Red Hat 8.0/9.0, but not with RH 7.1/6.2.

Why is it so? The command 'file' gives the following output (for the stock kernel),

rajen@localhost:~> file /boot/vmlinuz /boot/vmlinuz: Linux/i386 Kernel, Setup Version 0x203, bzImage

and for the re-complied kernel the output is,

rajen@localhost:~> file /boot/vmlinuz.custom /boot/vmlinuz.custom: Linux/i386 Kernel, Setup Version 0x203, bzImage

What seems to be problem? I tried by giving the parameters like "initrd= <initrd_image_file>", but the same thing. Basically the system just refuses to boot since it is not able to uncompress the kernel image.

Any pointers?

Rajen.