Towards a working initrd.img file

[Peter Tenenbaum <peter.g.tenenbaum@gmail.com>]

Hi again -- 

I've been having a problem since migrating my file system to RAID-1, which is that when I run update-initramfs, it produces an initrd.img file which doesn't work correctly; when I replace it with the initrd.img file which was constructed by the OS installer, I can boot correctly in my newly-RAIDified system.

From studying the error messages and Googling around, I surmise that the problem is as follows:

1.  In order for RAID-1 arrays to be correctly recognized, my initrd.img file needs to be generated with certain kernel modules, for example md_mod
2.  For some reason, the original kernel module has these, but the ones produced by update-initramfs do not.

So my question:  how do I configure update-initramfs so that it automatically includes the kernel modules I need?  I note that there is a file, /etc/initramfs-tools/modules, which in my case has no module names in it; presumably I can look at /proc/modules and copy the names of all the modules shown in the latter into the former.  Would that solve my problem?  Is there a better way?

Thanks in advance for any advice on how to get update-initramfs working for me.  Right now, since I depend on an initrd.img file which I can't reproduce, I feel like I'm living on borrowed time.

-PT