I recently installed a potato from scratch. My partition setup was to have a small /boot and a larger /, plus a swap. Installation went just fine, and everything installed. I was asked to make the disk bootable, which I said yes to.
When rebooting, it couldn't find the kernel. After booting the installation again, and checking, it seems that it had installed the kernel as "/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.17-sun4cdm", but SILO was setup on booting "/boot/vmlinuz", which didn't exist. I was able to boot, by specifying the kernel name when booting. Greetings, Tomas