kernel won't boot from floppy

[dj015]

I've got Gentoo 1.4 with gentoo-sources-2.4.22-r2, and everything works fine. If I do "cat /boot/bzImage > /dev/fd0" and reboot, I get back into my system just fine.

I am trying to set up a small Linux version I can use to boot from my USB flash drive, and I set up a chroot-ed Gentoo installation, exactly the same as my main installation (well, less agressive optimizations: only -Os -g0). I built a kernel like before (with make dep && make bzImage modules modules_install, in my chroot-ed directory) but with slightly different options (almost everything in the kernel instead of modules). This kernel can boot my system if I load it through grub, but if I do "cat bzImage > /dev/fd0", or even "dd if=bzImage of=/dev/fd0 bs=1k", I get this when I reboot:

Loading Linux......
Uncompressing Linux...
invalid compression format (err=1)
System halted

I've tried changing the CPU type (even to i386) - no effect.
I've tried unmerging gentoo-sources and doing "rm -rf /usr/src/*" then re-emerging it - no luck.
I've tried compiling and installing the kernel without chrooting - no difference.
I've tried playing around with ramdisk support, rdev options, just about everything - nothing.

I might have gotten err=2 once, but I can't remember how .

Googled around - seems to happen a lot for no apparent reason.

Why can grub load it?

Oh, and do the current versions of Gentoo come with a 2.6 kernel?

[Catach]

Not sure I can help you with the USB flash drive problem, except perhaps suggest a vmlinuz kernel image (not bzImage) which I dont believe is compressed. Regarding the 2.6 kernel, it's been out for a while, however it is under a different ebuild name. gentoo-sources is being kept as 2.4 AFAIK, and the 2.6 source tree is named gentoo-dev-sources.
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