Recompile Kernel

[Jeremy Hein]

Does anyone have step by step instructions to recompile a kernel or can possibly help me? And please don't point me to the kernel howto since I've been down that road. I've tried several times all with different problems. First of all, I am recompiling because I want to add ntfs, ipx, and possibly some others in the future. I normally begin by running make xconfig, but the problem is I don't want to look through every option (half of which are totally unknown to me). Is there a way to load the current kernel configurations? I then run make dep and make clean and make bzImage. If I copy the bzImage and put the "kernel /bzImage" command in grub, then my new kernel boots with the ntfs support, but it doesn't mount my ethernet card and it complains about not having ext3 support and there's nothing but kernel.h in my /boot directory?!?! If instead of copying the new kernel, I do a make install, then it appends custom to the name of the kernel files in my /boot directory and creates a new section in my grub.conf file, but when I boot with it, it has a heart attack (kernel panick) and says something about my root=LABEL being a problem. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Jeremy