Sounds like the devices were not correctly copied into the initrd, which very well could be because of the 2.4 kernel (more specifically because of no udev support).
You could also try using Yaird instead of initramfs-tools to build the initrd file.
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re: Boot error! /sbin/init 432: Couldn't find /dev/console
Sounds like the devices were not correctly copied into the initrd, which very well could be because of the 2.4 kernel (more specifically because of no udev support).
You could also try using Yaird instead of initramfs-tools to build the initrd file.