Re: Peeking inside initrd

[Carl Johnson <carlj@peak.org>]

Ross Boylan <RossBoylan@stanfordalumni.org> writes:

> How do I peek inside an initrd produce by make-kpkg (2.6.14 kernel, I
> think yaird produced the file)?
> 
> zcat initrd-flavor > tinit
> and then mounting tinit on a loopback, but I always got errors that
> the file system was unreadable.

The following should give you some ideas:

# mount -r -t cramfs /boot/initrd.img-2.6.8-11-amd64-k8 /mnt -o loop=/dev/loop1
# df /mnt
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/boot/initrd.img-2.6.8-11-amd64-k8
                         10940     10940         0 100% /mnt
# ls -l /boot/initrd.img-2.6.8-11-amd64-k8 
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 4182016 Oct  1 14:21 /boot/initrd.img-2.6.8-11-amd64-k8

I got the information from mount(8), and you may want to look at the
-x option in cramfsck(8) (in the cramfsprogs package).  I am sure
there are other ways to do this.

-- 
Carl Johnson		carlj@peak.org