Re: Can't mount CD/DVD drives
On Wed, Feb 15, 2006 at 07:20:53PM -0500, Carl Brown wrote:
> In the past, and I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong,
> an initrd image was only required if the system booted from a SCSI drive,
> or had some other exotic arrangement.
Perhaps if your root file system was something needing configuration
before being used by the kernel eg RAID/LVM setups.
These days it's more general though. The kernel doesn't have IDE, SCSI,
file system drivers statically compiled in; they're all loaded as
modules. This allows one kernel to fit all systems without compiling
every driver in statically, which would make for an enormous kernel that
would waste memory for everyone.
So the static kernel contains enough drivers to load the RAM disk and
its file system only.
> (This system is booting from an SATA, if that makes a difference.)
> So if one is booting a system that should not require an initrd image, couldn't any
> initrd image be safely deleted, provided the appropriate edits were made to the grub menu file?
No, as the kernel won't have built-in drivers for your IDE controller,
your root file system etc. If you want to run without initrd, you need
to rebuild the kernel image.
> Or more to the point, why did the debian installer set up an initrd image if it was not necessary?
It's not not necessary :)
Hamish
--
Hamish Moffatt VK3SB <hamish@debian.org> <hamish@cloud.net.au>
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