[Charlug] initramfs problem

[Pierre Abbat]

My computer got wedged and I had to reboot it. The cause for wedging appears 
to be the CD drive, which I'd like to replace with a burner anyway; but when 
I rebooted, I found myself in BusyBox with an "(initramfs)" prompt, and I had 
no idea what to do. That was with Linux 2.6.22. I successfully rebooted 
2.6.20. Several weeks ago I upgraded to gutsy, but didn't reboot afterward. 
The root filesystem is reiserfs (I thought it was ext3, but I must have made 
a mistake installing). /boot is ext3. How do I debug an initramfs, or make 
one for 2.6.22?

Pierre