After a failed installation of nvidia driver, somehow I've lost the compiled 2.6.20 kernel, actually, only the initrd, if I understood it right.

I've then recreated one by repeating exactly with the same command I've used to create it when I was first following the instructions from some "compiling your kernel for dummies" kind of webpage.

I can now boot with the .20 kernel, but the resulting initrd file was quite small compared with the one for the .18 kernel. The latter has 5.4MB while the other has only 1.1MB.

Is that normal, or something resulting from the fact that I simply repeated the same command I used when I was compiling the kernel?

I wonder if during the whole process of compilation there were some implicit variables that did a slightly larger and more "complete" initrd the first time. Unfortunately, I never look at the file size of the one that somehow got deleted during the attempt to install the nvidia card.