capture kernel panic / hardware problem?

[Johnson, Shaunn]

Howdy list:

Running RHEL v.3.0 rel. 2. (new install)

I have been having a problem with what I -think- is
the kernel, but not sure.  Every time I do something like
extract data (via cpio -idmv) or copy something to
or from directories, I get a kernel panic.  I thought
it may have something to do with the filesystem,
so I went to kernel.org and compiled 2.4.26 and see
if it really was the options in the initial install.

I'll have to figure out how to post the result of
the panic.  I thought I modified the /etc/syslog.conf
to capture the errors, but nothing ever gets put into
the messages file.

Questions:

1) how can I capture kernel panic messages and put 
it into a file when this happens?

[my /etc/syslog.conf modification looks like so:

kern.*                  /var/log/kern.log
...
]

2) I can't help but to think that this is a problem with
the IDE drive, but there are no hardware error regarding
/dev/hdb or the like in the messages file.  I'm going to
switch out the drive, but why would cpio or cp cause
the kernel to freak out if not hardware?

Note: I didn't run up2date on this server - I will try that
tonight as well.

Suggestions?

Thanks!

-X
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