"All of your loopback devices are in use!"
This may occur if you accidentally overwrote your default kernel with a bad configuration and the initial ramdisk is unavailable. The only way I have found to overcome it is to rebuild the default 2.4.18-14 kernel, with your Makefile in /usr/src/linux-2.4 configured to "EXTRAVERSION = -14" and using a .config file copied from /usr/src/linux-2.4/configs/kernel-2.4.18-i686.config
In other words, go back to this page and start from the beginning to build the default 2.4.18-14 kernel. Once you have got that working, you can try building custom configurations.
"Kernel panic : No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel"
The boot-loader (Grub or Lilo) has failed to find the ramdisk initialization image: intrd-kernelversion.img
1. Have you referenced initrd correctly in the boot-loader configuration file?
2. Does it actually exist in the /boot directory? If not, go back to /usr/src/linux-2.4 and try mkinitrd .
"Kernel panic : (various)"
If using Lilo, did you run lilo before re-booting? And is your kernel correctly referenced in the boot-loader configuration file?
title Red Hat Linux default kernel (2.4.18-14)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.18-14 ro root=LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi
initrd /initrd-2.4.18-14.img
Lilo
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.18-14 label=2.4.18-14 #Note- LILO is fussy about label formats (equivalent to GRUB "title" above). Keep them short, and do not include any spaces. initrd=/boot/initrd-2.418-14.img read-only root=/dev/hda1
Please read the associated boot-loader documentation to understand how the disk partition references are set. Grub numbering starts from '0' while Lilo starts from '1'...