[juneau-lug] mkinitrd

  • From: James Zuelow <e5z8652@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <juneau-lug@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2002 18:22:27 -0900 (AKST)

Anyone here use the mkinitrd utility on a regular basis?

I'm attempting to create a cd-boot image for my IBM PowerPC project.  For
some reason (probably due to IBM's PReP implementation, although that's
just a semi-educated guess on my part) I can't get my system to boot a
kernel image on a floppy and then load a root disk.

One of two things happens:  Either the system hangs and will not let me
load a root floppy (they keyboard does not respond when the "Press Enter"
prompt comes up) or, it loads the root floppy but seems to hang attempting
to decompress it.

However if I dd the Debian Woody root.bin image to the hard disk, and tell
the boot floppy that the root is on the hard drive, it boots and the
installation script runs fine.  I had the idea that I could just burn the
boot image and the boot.bin image to CD, and tell the kernel that
root=/dev/sr0 (No IDE, so if there is a CD it is SCSI) - no dice though,
it can't find /dev/sr0 and I get a kernel oops.  /dev/sr0 is present in
the Debian root.bin image though.

So now I'm attempting to make a kernel + root.bin image with mkinitrd.
I've never actually done it, and if anyone on the list has (especially
with the Debian package) I'd like to hear any gotchas or tricks before I
start burning more coasters.

I would *really really* like to be able to put together a bootable CD
image to get Linux on these old machines.  I can do it now, but it's not
user friendly and involves 10 or 11 steps.

Cheers,

James


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