[PLUG] initrd files are cpio archives

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Thu Oct 18 18:56:13 UTC 2007


On Thu, 18 Oct 2007 11:02:29 -0700 (PDT)
alan <alan at clueserver.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 18 Oct 2007, Eric Wilhelm wrote:
> 
> > # from John Jason Jordan
> > # on Thursday 18 October 2007 10:34:
> >
> >> Russell Senior <russell at personaltelco.net> wrote:
> >>>   zcat /boot/initrd.img-2.6.17-2-686 | cpio -i --list -v | less
> >
> >> So then (using Slax) I unzipped them with Ark into Kate so I could
> >> view them. They are all unreadable
> >
> > Hmm...  I guess Russell had already explained that.  Did you read
> > that bit?

Yes, but I thought that Ark would know what they are and use
appropriate unzipping tools, which I think it did.

> I am currious as to the specs of the machine having this problem.  I
> am seeing an AMD64 machine that gets a similar error on boot, but
> only with a new kernel.  If I use an old kernel, it is fine.  (I have
> a feeling it relates to an ata kernel bug that has been fixed by the
> kernel team, but not made it into the current releases.)
> 
> Any chance of getting a copy of /sbin/lspci for the problem machine?

Using lspci would require that it be booted, and I haven't succeeded at
that yet. I do have Slax running on it, and Slax happily mounted the
hard disk, so I can give you a copy of any file you want, but not the
output of a command. That is, unless there is some magic way of getting
the output of lspci when the machine is not booted.

The two kernels available in the Grub boot menu are 2.6.20-15-generic
and -16-generic. Neither will boot, regardless of which initrd.img file
I try - and I tried all four of them. The date stamps on the -15- kernel
initrd files are 2007-04-24 and 2007-04-25, and for the -16- kernel
2007-09-04 and 2007-09-28. In each case the older of the two was named
-.bak.

I am wondering what would happen if I took an amd64 initrd.img file
from my desktop, which also runs Ubuntu Feisty amd64, and stuck it on
the laptop. Looking at them the date stamps are different. I'm going to
try it this evening after I get back from school, which is where I'm
off to right after I send this.



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