Kernel Panic: unable to mount root fs

Binary package hint: kernel-image-2.4.27-2-686

I have been attempting to install edgy on my older dual-proc PIII 800. The 2.6 kernel fails to boot with an overflow in SCM_MSG_LOOP, so I decided to install 2.4.27.
I used ctrl-alt-f2 to get to busybox, waited until the Edgy installer asked me what "additional" packages that I wanted, and then chrooted to /target. I then apt-get install'd the 2.4.27-2-686 package.
The post-install script doesn't create the initial RAM disk correctly. Rather than putting the initial ram disk correctly in /boot, it instead creates no initial RAM disk anywhere, and creates a dangling /initrd.img link to /bootinitrd.img-2.4.27-2-686. I suspect someone forgot a forward slash in there when they wrote the script. The result is that when attempting to boot, there is no initial RAM disk, and then the kernel will panic with the error message "cannot mount root fs UUID=<garbage text>, please append a correct entry to root=". Attempting to change the initial RAM disk manually in menu.lst isn't going to work, because there IS no initial RAM disk, at least as far as I can tell.