>On Tue, 13 May 2003, Oisin C. Feeley wrote: >> >>I was trying to rescue a Red Hat 7.3 laptop using a Red Hat 9 CD#1. >>Should this be possible? >> >>If I try to boot into rescue mode using CD#1 on a PCMCIA CDROM the boot >>process gets as far as allowing language selection and then asks for the >>location of the rescue image. If I select CDROM then it fails to find >>the device. >> ><snip> > >Hmm, I guess I should clarify that I want to know how is it that the >machine is able to detect and use the CDROM so that it gets to the stage >of loading the image from it and then it decides, _just_ before I would >expect it to give me the shell, to start complaining about the CDROM? > >The machine boots fine with a Red Hat 7.3 CD#1 that I got a hold of in >the interval, but I still want to know what's going on and how I could >work around this in the future. > >Should I try to build a new boot.img or something? I'm not sure how >they were produced on CD#1 although I'm guessing that if I follow the >instructions on the isolinux homepage it _might_ work. > Well, just to follow up: 1. A PCMCIA-patched kernel (2.4.20-9.5) is available from Arjan van der Ven and is reported to work by others. 2. I can copy the isolinux directory contents from CD#1 and make a bootable CDROM following the directions in the rh-ig. This CD behaves exactly like CD#1 (it halts just before it should give me a shell). Not surprising as the vmlinuz in the isolinux directory is the default one. 3. If I copy the 2.4.20-9.5 kernel into the isolinux directory and rename it as vmlinuz, then do a mkinitrd to produce the appropriate initrd.img, then follow the instructions again I produce a "semi-bootable" CDROM that loads the vmlinuz and the intird, does some hardware detection and then fails at the pivot_root stage: RAMDISK: compressed image found at block 0 Freeing intird memory: 145K freed VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) Red Hat nash version starting Loading jbd.o module Mounting /proc filesystem Creating block devices Creating root device Making root filesystem Ext3-fs unable to read superblock mount: error 22 mounting ext3 pivotroot: pivot_root(/sysroot, /sysroot/initrd) failed: 2 umount /initrd/proc failed: 2 Freeing unused kernel memory 132K freed Kernel panic: no init found. Try passing init=option to kernel Does it make any difference that "rdev vmlinuz" reports that the root device set in the kernels is "/dev/md0" (raid device)? I seem to recall that this had become irrelevant with isolinux. Any suggestions at all? Comments gratefully received. Thanks, Oisin Feeley
