I need help understanding how to use the initrd that the installer places in my /boot directory. I'm trying to install on an external FireWire drive on a second-generation iBook. I'm trying to avoid repartitioning my internal drive, which is full of valuable data and doesn't really have space for a second OS.
yaboot apparently doesn't support booting off of sbp2 - it fails to install from the installer, and when I run it manually it says it won't work. So I copied my /boot directory to a /boot directory on my internal drive, an HFS+ filesystem. It seems to work OK to load the kernel, but I'm not sure if the initrd is getting used, or if the modules I need to access my firewire drive are getting loaded. When I have the installer detect hardware, it finds my firewire drive, and loads the ieee1394, ohci1394 and sbp2 modules just fine. I can do the initial installation from the netinst cdrom to my firewire drive OK. The kernel can't find my root filesystem. It is on partition 11 of the first SCSI disk (firewire storage transports SCSI CDBs over SBP2). I've tried kernel parameters like the following: boot: hd:5,/boot/vmlinux initrd=/boot/initrd.img ramdisk=10000 root=/dev/sda11 The kernel panics because it can't mount the root filesystem. I'm not sure what modules are present in the initrd.img that the installer makes, or how it selects which ones get loaded. I don't see any messages about loading the initrd so I think I might not be giving the kernel command line correctly. The best I can tell from googling is that this should work if the right modules are present in the initrd.img but I'm not sure whether they are. When I get the cash I'm going to put a bigger hard drive internal to the iBook and then I'll dual boot internally. In the meantime once I can boot linux I'll make a bootable CD that knows about my setup. Thanks for your help, Mike Crawford goingware at g m a i l dot com Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.
