"couldn't determine symbol block size"

I recently got a WorkPad z50 off a friend.  He had 2.0.2 installed on
it, on an IBM 340M microdrive.  It's perhaps important to note that
this install was set up to use hpcboot rather than pbsdboot.

As part of my learning my way around, I tried to set up 3.1.  I had
been able to boot with root on nfs without any problem, so I went to
set 3.1 up that way.  I set up the NFS root directory, but when I tried
to put the 3.1 kernel on the msdos filesystem on the microdrive, it
wouldn't fit.

Now, there are multiple ways around this.  But what I tried to do was
to resize the partitions on the thing, to enlarge the msdos filesystem.
So I put the microdrive in a CF-to-PCMCIA adapter and popped it into
another machine, dumped an image of the contents so I'd have a backup,
repartitioned, restored the ffs contents, destroyed the msdos
partition's contents, then put it in the mahcine and let it remake the
msdos filesystem.  Back into the other machine, mount (with -l, to be
sure), and copy everything over.

But now, when I try to boot from it, hpcboot pops up an alert box
titled "WARNING", saying "couldn't determine symbol block size", and
the boot wedges with the blue bar somewhere around 80-90 percent of the
way across the screen; I have to hard-reset the machine (by removing
the battery) to recover - the reset button on the back makes it shut
down, but it won't turn back on until I pull the battery.

Now, I know 2.0.2 is not the most current; it's not even the most
current release.  But I can't figure out why there's a difference
between the microdrive before I started messing with it and now.  This
means there's something I don't understand, and things I don't
understand are practically guaranteed to turn into problems, usually at
about the most inconvenient time they can.

Any idea what's up?

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