Compiling 2.4 kernel on older machine

[Steve Holmes]

What kind of success has people been having compiling 2.4 kernels on older
style machines such as 486 with IDE drives?  I've been running into all
kinds of problems getting the kernel to work with my second IDE drive.
Basically, I have one IDE drive (40 meg I use for booting on /dev/hda and
a second larger IDE drive on /dev/hdc.  Up till now this all worked fine.
BTW HDB points to a CDROM drive.  With my old 2.2.18 kernel which I
compiled myself all drives were fine and the Slackware boot image with
2.2.19 works ok too.

The problems range from losing interrupts every few seconds to kernel
panics resulting in the inability to mount the root file system at all!  I
have my root file system on /dev/hdc.  The BIOS is apparently old enough
that I cannot boot with this 2.5 gig drive and this is why the crazy
settup.  I've been experimenting with different IDE config options with
the compile.  It's got to be around the IDE configs I would think.

Any ideas?
<Steve>