Hi,
I'v been busy installing my debian 'sarge' kernel 2.6.9 for weeks now. My problem is my harddisk. I have a maxtor SATA disk with two partitions formatted as NTFS. The other two are formatted ext3 and one swap.
When I recompile my kernel I HAVE to do that with "make-kpkg --initrd" so it makes a initial ramdisk. The only condition is that I compile my ext3-drivers and sata-drivers as Module. I think that when I compile them as a module my initrd uses the modules in the ramdisk. Is this true?
Debian's mkinitrd tries to guess the list of modules to load at boot time using the currently running configuration. I.e. _if_ your currently mounted root partition is managed by a sata module, then this module is loaded at boot time for the new initrd.img, too.
What I want to know is how to make my own initrd with the drivers for sata, ext3 and ntfs(rw). I want to mount my NTFS partition at boot so I think I have to put them in my initrd.
You can extend the list of modules to load in /etc/mkinitrd/modules. Then you can build an initrd.img without make-kpkg (for testing) using
mkinitrd -o /boot/initrd.img-test 2.6.10
Next configure Lilo or Grub.
But:
initrd.img should be used just to make your root partition available (and maybe to load some keyboard or other basic drivers). Once the root filesystem is mounted the init script on the initrd.img passes the boot control to it. This root filesystem is much easier to configure.
If you don't plan to make one of your ntfs partitions the root filesystem (which I would not recommend), then it should be sufficient to add these partitions to /etc/fstab on the root partition. Then they will be loaded at boot time after the startup code in initrd.img has been done.
Good luck
Harri
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