Installer initrd question
I need help understanding how to use the initrd that the installer
places in my /boot directory. I'm trying to install on an external
FireWire drive on a second-generation iBook. I'm trying to avoid
repartitioning my internal drive, which is full of valuable data and
doesn't really have space for a second OS.
yaboot apparently doesn't support booting off of sbp2 - it fails to
install from the installer, and when I run it manually it says it
won't work. So I copied my /boot directory to a /boot directory on my
internal drive, an HFS+ filesystem. It seems to work OK to load the
kernel, but I'm not sure if the initrd is getting used, or if the
modules I need to access my firewire drive are getting loaded.
When I have the installer detect hardware, it finds my firewire drive,
and loads the ieee1394, ohci1394 and sbp2 modules just fine. I can do
the initial installation from the netinst cdrom to my firewire drive
OK.
The kernel can't find my root filesystem. It is on partition 11 of
the first SCSI disk (firewire storage transports SCSI CDBs over SBP2).
I've tried kernel parameters like the following:
boot: hd:5,/boot/vmlinux initrd=/boot/initrd.img ramdisk=10000 root=/dev/sda11
The kernel panics because it can't mount the root filesystem.
I'm not sure what modules are present in the initrd.img that the
installer makes, or how it selects which ones get loaded. I don't see
any messages about loading the initrd so I think I might not be giving
the kernel command line correctly.
The best I can tell from googling is that this should work if the
right modules are present in the initrd.img but I'm not sure whether
they are.
When I get the cash I'm going to put a bigger hard drive internal to
the iBook and then I'll dual boot internally. In the meantime once I
can boot linux I'll make a bootable CD that knows about my setup.
Thanks for your help,
Mike Crawford
goingware at g m a i l dot com
Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.
Reply to: