Software :: How To Edit The Initrd.img (decompress And Compress)

I need to recreate my initrd.img after having extracted its contents. Bash by itself; pointing me to similar threads in this forum and google are useless to me and a waste of everyone's time as that has all failed. I need a working example. Apparently, I am supposed to use this bash command (s): "zcat ../initrd.gz | cpio -i -d." The preceding command is unintelligible to me. I cannot compress the initrd.img file and folders back into an initrd.gz file with a compression level of 9, so that I can rename with a .img extension.

My understanding of recompressing folders back into the initrd.img: Google and this forum all point to bash involving either zcat or cpio and then gzip with a compression level of 9. However, I require exacting instructions for using these commands to compress the folders that have been extracted from the initrd.img back into one homogenous initrd.gz archive so that that the created initrd.gz can be renamed initrd.img

Note: posting bash without that an example is a waste of everyone's time as I found that on Google and it was useless as I lack the requisite computer science degree or years of Linux guru experience needed to figure out how to specify the arguements proprerly. What I need is a working example, not just bash.

Note2: To save time, the answer to why I need to edit the initrd.img is this: Two different utilities (based upon the same parent system & kernel) use the same initrd and the same file paths. When they are installed on separate partitions and the one farthest from the mbr is selected for boot, it will begin to boot and then switch to the one closest to the mbr, which results in a failed boot. If one is removed, the other boots fine, so it's not a menu.lst or a lilo config problem.