Re: Installer initrd question
On Fri, Sep 16, 2005 at 03:29:27AM -0700, Michael Crawford wrote:
> 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.
Do :
echo sbp2 >> /etc/mkinitrd/modules
dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-2.6.12-1-powerpc
(Or whatever your kernel is), modify your /etc/yaboot.conf to havea new config
pointing to your firewire device (probably /dev/sda<part>), run ybin, reboot
and be happy.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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