OK, I still don't understand what exactly went wrong, but my system boot nicely now. I think the problem was here : > Trying to resume from /dev/hda3 > No suspend signature on swap, not resuming. > Creating root device. > Mounting root filesystem. > mount: error mounting /dev/root on /sysroot as auto: No such device ^^^^ This is because, when I ran mkinitrd, /etc/fstab was reading: /dev/hda1 / auto defaults 1 1 instead of : /dev/hda1 / ext3 defaults 1 1 I am not really sure this was the problem, and can only suppose that the support for ext3 was missing in the initrd.img (ext3 as a module, they are crazy ;-), but I re-ran mkinitrd after editing fstab and voila. Thanks to all of you for your answers ! -- Philippe