"Unable to open an initial console"

The following message provide the workaround to deal with the problem of booting in custom compliation of kernel specially on Fedora core 3. The system fails to boot giving a "unable to open an initial console".
I have taken this solution as it is from a newsgroup site.

Reason of problem:
-------------------
During the boot process linux expects /dev/console {along with /dev/zero and
/dev/null}entries to be created during the boot process. If it doesn't found
any of the entries, it simply can not open the console device.

In fedora core 3 initrd is responsible for creating the /dev/console related
entries (if you are using initrd for booting up your machine) using udev.
Also fedora core 3 distribution has cutomized udev to work with the
distribution.

Interested readers can further read how udev works and customized for Fedora
core 3.

The solutions:
-------------
The simple solution is to create the entries in /dev for console manually
and don't use initrd for booting the machine (or in other words do not
depend on udev to create console entries during bootup process). Use
following set of commands: -

mkdir /tmp/dev
mount --move /dev /tmp/dev
sbin/MAKEDEV null console zero
mount --move /tmp/dev /dev

Now reboot the machine without initrd. It should work.
This is just a work around and
not the exact solution. Correct solution would be to use latest mkinitrd and
udev packages and use them for FC3.

test........