Customizing a kernel starting with a genkernel config

[Foszoe]

I have an Acer Aspire laptop that am dual booting Gentoo and Windows on. I have used Gentoo on a desktop but its 6 years old so I am learning quite a bit from the hardware changes. I always used manual kernel builds in the past, but on this lap top I used genkernel to get up and running a bit quicker.It is also my first exposure to an UEFI system and Grub2. I did use grub legacy on the desktop.

I wanted to go back to running a manual kernel without the initramfs since that is what I was used to so I was going to leave the initramfs removal for last and just remove unneeded modules first because I am familiar with that then I planned to turn off the initramfs in the kernel once I had a kernel with only the modules needed for my laptop.

I zcatted the running genkernel config into the /usr/src/Linux/ directory and made several iterations of removing unnecessary drivers etc for my system. Of course I finally ran into one where it appears I broke it because of some initramfs error it appears as I was dropped into a busybox shell asking for the root fs. I wasn't sure how to tell it what it wanted to know, but I didn't figure it to be big deal because I would just boot with my .old kernel and revisit the changes again.

When I rebooted using the old kernel though, I did not observe the usual Font size change from large to small that I was accustomed to seeing when other kernels had successfully booted. I also "observed" right before the login: prompt 3 red ERROR messages flash by, but when I paged up they were nowhere to be seen. They would have been right after the statement zero modules autoloaded. The sound system no longer worked with the old kernel and I was not able to startx. so the errors may have been something related.

I then tried taking the config.old file and rebuilding the kernel from it since it was originally a good config but I still had the same issues. The only way I have been able to get back to "normal" is to run genkernel again and start over but at some point I ran into the same issue so I am stumped.

can someone point me in the right direction?

[frankenputer]