On Thursday 22 February 2007 01:58, Alan McKinnon wrote: > Or you could dp it the way Boyd does it - with his / on an lvm group. To > do that he needs an initramfs which has drivers for at least his disk > bus, his disk adapter, the filesystem on / and lvm before his kernel > can access /. Genkernel is just an easy automated way to do that.
Or it would be, but the last initramfs it generated for me wouldn't start my md0 (whole-disk software RAID via mdadm) device, which is part of the volume group holding /. [I should try again, perhaps genkernel has gotten smart enough to read my mdadm.conf, ala Debian, and start whole-disk software RAID.] Right now, I get dumped to a shell prompt inside the initramfs each time my system boots, I then have to start my volume group manually in partial mode to get (RO) access to the block device / is on. [I don't seem to even have the right tools inside the initramfs to bring up whole-disk software RAID, or at least I haven't figured out how.] Then Gentoo tries to boot but fails because it can't mount / as RW (lvm marks lvs in vgs started in partial mode as RO block devices) although it doesn't bail out quickly, so it thinks certain services (like localmount) have started when they haven't. I then log in as root and bring all the lvs to RW status, remount /, restart the 3-4 services that Gentoo thinks are up, and let it continue. In short, my boot process is fsck'd, but I don't reboot enough to have it really bother me. But, this thread isn't really about my troubles even if some of my setup *is* useful as examples of why you might need an initramfs. [My fsck'd setup also shows how powerful the layered startup in *nix is. Failing to find your C: drive in Windows is not really recoverable without boot media.] -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. [EMAIL PROTECTED] ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.org/ \_/ New GPG Key! Old key expires 2007-03-25. Upgrade NOW!
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