custom initrd.img / loader problem

[James_Martin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

I have made a custom "loader" executable that sits in the initrd.img.  The 
only thing I did was comment out the call checkForHardDrives function and 
the function itself.

 For whatever reason, the initrd detects the hardware it needs to, but can 
not load the drivers:

* modules to insert e100 scsi_mod sym53c8xx cciss
* module(s) e100 scsi_mod sym53c8xx cciss not found

I found the code for the "not found" error in modules.c:

    *items = '\0';
    for (l = list, p = paths; *l && p; l++, p++) {
        if (!p->path) {
            if (*items) strcat(items, " ");
            strcat(items, *l);
            i++;
        }
    }

    if (*items) logMessage("module(s) %s not found", items);


but I don't know that I can make sense of it.

I've tried increasing the size of the initrd's ext2 filesystem by 1MB but 
that didn't work either.  The one thing that is bothering me is the size 
differences between the loader executable I created and the standard one:


custom loader:

-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root       721405 Sep 23 15:39 loader

standard loader:

-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root       441248 Sep  2 15:43 loader

I've been struggling with this for 3 days and I am at wits end. 

Thank you for any help.

James

James S. Martin, RHCE
Contractor
Administrative Office of the United States Courts
Washington, DC
(202) 502-2394