ramdisk help?

[justin bailey <justin mama stg brown edu>]

the installation saga continues.
i figured if i was having problems with the installer, that it might be
the ramdisk's fault.  so i got the updated ramdisk.img from
updates.redhat.com, formatted a floppy, and rawrote it.
and just in case my boot floppy was also bad, instead of booting from it,
i used
boot -t iso9660 sr0:kernels/avanti.gz load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=1
it boots the kernel just fine, but when i put in the new ramdisk, i get
RAMDISK: compressed image found at block 0
floppy0: data CRC error: track 44, head 1, sector 5, size 2
floppy0: data CRC error: track 44, head 1, sector 5, size 2
end_request: I/O error, dev 02:00, sector 1606

then a repeat of the above errors, then

Unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address 000000000000ffda
swapper(1): Oops 0

then a bunch of numbers and codes

sounds ominous!  does anyone know what i did wrong?  did i get the right
ramdisk?
thanks.

justin