Lennart Sorensen wrote:
On Thu, Sep 01, 2005 at 03:12:28PM -0700, Neil Gunton wrote:This is a stupid question, but I am trying to create a netinst bootable CD and I don't know how to do the El Torito thing with the boot image. Is there an easy way to generate the bootable iso from the "official" netinst CD I have, given that I have mirrored the files to my hard drive so I can replace the initrd and vmlinuz?You should tell it to use isolinux/isolinux.bin as the boot image, and use the no emulation option, and there is one other option about size I can't remember (I think it should be 4k but I can't remember for sure).Sorry to bug you, but any clues much appreciated... I've read lots about the boot.img requirement, but I have no idea where you're meant to get that from. I see there's a boot.cat on the CD already. Can we somehow extract the existing boot image and re-use that?mkisofs generates boot.cat for you. ie: mkisofs -o /tmp/sarge-amd64-2.6.12-netinst.iso -r -J -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.cat . The config in the isolinux dir points at the kernel files in install. Len Sorensen
Thanks very much for the tips! I was in fact doing something similar to this all day yesterday, and I now have a handy little pile of CD coasters. I just can't get this thing to boot! I just tried it using your incantation and it doesn't make any difference.
Here's what I am doing: I have an working version of CentOS 4.1 installed on the hard drive (actually 4 hard drives, RAID 10) and running ok using i2o_block. I downloaded 2.6.12.6 from kernel.org and built it, including the new 64-bit-capable dpt_i2o driver from Adaptec (it won't compile on 2.6.13). That works fine, and I can even boot into it off the hard drive from grub. All the important modules are compiled statically into the kernel. This includes all the ide, scsi, dpt_i2o, ext3 etc. But when I try this from my custom netinst cd, there is a kernel panic. To build the CD I am simply replacing the install/vmlinuz and install/initrd.gz with my own versions, and then creating the iso and burning the CD as outlined above. It does boot ok past the isolinux and into the kernel, and it does appear to recognize the RAID card. But then it gets the panic:
... Freeing unused kernel memory: 220k freed Red Hat nash version 4.2.1.3 starting Mounted /proc filesystem Mounting sysfs Creating /dev Starting udev Creating root device Mounting root filesystem mount: error 6 mounting ext3 mount: error 2 mounting none Switching to new root switchroot: mount failed: 22 umount /initrd/dev failed: 2 Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!What am I doing wrong here??? Is this something to do with the /devfs issue? But Len, you must be doing something different, because your ISO gets past this point with no problem. I get the feeling I am missing some crucial piece in the kernel and/or CD build process that makes it not see that it's booting from CD.
Also, I'm a little confused as to why it's still saying "Red Hat nash version 4.2.1.3 starting", because this should be a custom kernel, I downloaded it from kernel.org. Where does it get the Red Hat bit from? Is that a system thing that it includes automatically, or are my kernels just somehow getting all mixed up with the one already on the hard drive (which really is the CentOS kernel)...
I am about out of ideas with this path, I'd love to be able to get a "real" Debian netinst CD working with dpt_i2o so that I can build a real Debian system from the ground up.
Any clues much appreciated... Thanks again, -Neil