[PLUG] The Clinic is ON

[Rich Burroughs]

Russell Senior wrote:

> I have no experience with Mandr-ake/-iva, or 64bit platforms, or
> really much with initrd's.  From mailing list traffic, people seem to
> be running this distribution elsewhere, so not sure what our specific
> problem was.  I think our initrd.img was probably bad for some reason,
> and my advice was to post to the Mandriva mailing lists to inquire
> about the problem.  Or maybe udev wasn't creating the /dev/hdaN
> devices quickly enough for them to appear in time to mount.
> 
> One possible thing to try would be to try installing to an ext2
> filesystem instead of ext3.  It might not solve your problem, but it
> might help illuminate what the real problem is.  If we had a
> cross-building environment for a 64-bit target, we might be able to
> just compile up a kernel version that didn't need an initrd and punt
> around that problem.
> 
> Any other ideas, people?

You could try ext2, I would be surprised if it made a difference but who 
knows.

The real question for me is whether there is support for all of the 
hardware needed to boot in the initrd, especially things like the disk 
controller and filesystems. There's not too much to know about initrd, 
you just need to make sure that all of the necessary hardware support is 
either in the kernel itself or available as a module in the initrd.

If Mandriva has a hardware compatability list, that would be a good 
place to start. Posting to their list is a good idea too. People come 
here with a lot of problems that I would usually take to the 
distro-specific list. Sometimes what seems like an odd error to us here 
is a known issue to the people on the distro's support list :)


Rich