Things that seem curious:Why is mkinitd caring about my hardware devices, doesn't it just need to see the files in /target?mkinitrd needs to build an initrd that will be able to find the real root device after booting. If /target/dev/cciss doesn't exist, mkinitrd has nothing to work from to figure out what the correct device is. IIRC, devfs is not actually used in the target, only in the root; so probably d-i needs to know how to map /dev/cciss/disc0/partX to a non-devfs device name (and make sure this mapped device is available in the target, i.e., MAKEDEV).
Ok, I think I understand a little better now. My next question is, I think, how does it get fixed? It looks like Mr. Lovergine had a similar problem in this thread:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2003/debian-boot-200312/msg00605.html
Why are there 3 partitions, there are only two in cfdisk (ext2, swap). Unless it counts a few megs of free space as another partition.You seem to have created one primary and one logical (extended) partition. part5 would be the first logical partition in a DOS partition table, and is contained within whichever one of part1 or part2 is the extended partition.
Here you are correct as well, it turns out that partition 1 was a 34 gig ext2 partition, and partition 2 was a 1 gig logical partition containing partition 5 which was also 1 gig. I am very curious as to why it is so. This partition setup was created by the autopartition part of the installer, why would it use those logical partition things? It seems a complicated way to do it.
thanks again, Erik