I finally got that 2.4 eval system up and running. What I eneded up doing, was booting the patch CD ram disk, like Mark had suggested, then using a combinataion of install fresh (chose the swap volume) and then backing out and selecting the update existing option, I got my filesystem to mount in the order I needed it to.
I was then able to use YaST to install the kernel RPM. I had to tar the maintenance CD, and then FTP it to my initial ramdisk system by using the FTP client installed on my new file system that was mounted at /mnt because the ramdisk system did not offer FTPd or command line ftp client. Fortunately you can run ftp standalone in a telnet shell using that method. Tar and Gzip/gunzip ARE included in the initial ram disk system and I was able to un-tar the image into a file system and then use install package feature of yast to individually select the kernel RPM I needed. I don't know if the above description of actual events is helpful to anyone else, but I thought I would provide it. The question I have now, is can I use this installed system to create another system image easily, as in run the installer against a new group of DASD ?
