Boot CD's and mkinitrd
Recently I've bee trying to replace my company's Ghost software when two
documents came my way. One was 'Stupid DD tricks' and the other was 'Linux
CD-ROM game system'. My plan became to use Linux and DD across the network
as our created images are now too big to fit on CD-ROM and we can't get
MD-DOS network setup on a floppy for our laptops.
The 'DD > gzip' and scripting I can handle. My problem is creating the boot
CD-ROM. I use Debian as a matter of religious preference and felt mildly
dirty reading through the document for the CD as the writer used 'Vine
Linux'.;-) I plowed on using my distrib of choice and a song in my hart.
I was able to translate between the two until I got to 'Making of
initrd-xxxx.img' (for a custom filesystem to be written as boot on the iso
image) and I came face to face with my horror. I could not find mkinitrd for
Debian! Time being short, I ground my teeth and installed RedHat as I had it
available. Not having played with RedHat before, I was slowed trying to find
how it initialized the network as it too had a problem with my Token Ring
PCMCIA card (keep the comments to yourself), but was able to continue.
Failure after failure greeted me trying to continue. RedHat used SASH
instead of ASH or BASH for boot disks so the script for the custom initrd's
linuxrc doesn't work. Getting around that, no matter what I do the CD
doesn't initialize correctly. For the Lilo boot, I get 'L 80 80 80 80 80
80.......' as it tries to access the floppy. Not what it is supposed to do.
:-(
Now, after a couple of days of fighting quickly to nowhere, "I want my
Debian back!" Is there a utility in Debian that allows me to create the
initrd images and a boot disk that it can be copied to? I'm assuming so for
the boot disk, but the mkinitrd equivalent is hidden to me. ANY help will be
greatly appreciated. There has to be a way as I can't see Debian taking a
back seat to any distrib on anything as it is *for* the gurus. Thanks
Ron
"It is assumed that the reader is reasonably familiar with the dpkg System
Administrators' manual. Unfortunately this manual does not yet exist."
-- Debian Packaging Manual
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