From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; SunOS sun4u; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20030711 Description of problem: I have seen this a couple of times, after installing a new 2.4 severn kernel while one of arjan's 2.6 kernel is running. When you try to boot the 2.4 kernel, you get errors suggesting that that the kernel is trying to read beyond the end of the initrd. Re-running mkinitrd by hand creates a good initrd, as does fscking the original initrd and recompressing. The contents when mounted of these initrds are the same, (diff -r complains at the special files in dev, but only the timestamps appear to be different), though the original one complains that recovery might be needed when mounting.
Does 'tune2fs -l' on the filesystems show different flags?
Could have just been a flaky 2.6 kernel with loop devs or something like that. I haven't seen it in my switching back and forth between kernels, but I've missed a few, too.