Re (3): Can slakware 13 boot from a CF-partition?

[no.to...@gmail.com]

In article <4f8f8fb0$0$290$1472...@news.sunsite.dk>, Joe Rosevear <Joe_Ro...@localhost.invalid> wrote:

Thanks Joe,
your idea of expanding initrd.gz and looking at init for the
error message, and seeing what was trying to be done THEN is good!
>
> It might help you to see what is in an initrd.gz.
>
> I learned from Helmut Hullen (in this news group) that this will
> extract the contents from an initrd.gz:
>
> zcat <path to initrd.gz> | cpio -vim
> and this will make an initrd.gz (as an alternative to using mkinitrd):
>
> find . | cpio -o -H newc | gzip > <path to initrd.g>
>
> If you do open up an initrd.gz, then look at file init. That is the
> script that takes over from Grub and finishes the job.
>
> The initrd.gz also contains lib/modules/<kernel version>. It contains
> modules that init uses until it passes control to the Slackware
> installation that you are booting.
>
-----------------
zcat <path to initrd.gz> | cpio -vim
is a punishing journey and you don't want to see my massive
log of attempt at various combinations.
= on the PC's slak-based-kogi it gave "cpio: Malformed number"
and hung. Suspecting an oveflowed buffer/pipe, I tried on my
net-book which has a 2GB RAM [I think], and saw the expanded
dir-tree, with <the init script>.
I remember that I was not happy that the dir-tree had been
written to the dir of the initrd.gz, but I can't find the expanded
initrd.gz or re-create it!? Even with the assumption that the seen
one was created by live-CD and was thus written to RAM & lost.

An alternate approach to your suggestion is to:
<gunzip> initrd.gz | fold | \
<grep key-word in error message plus some lines before & after>
which should show what it was trying to do when it put the
error-message.

Perhaps someone can diagnose the problem from this manually
copied extract of the error-message:---
md: ..autorun DONE. VFS: Cannot open root device "812" or unknown-block(8,18)
...avaible paritions <sda1,2,3,4 <-- Win7 hard-disk> !!
------------------------------
Between Slak13 and Slak-kogi it complains about block(8,18) and block(0,0)
and it suggests that it only likes/finds-readable FAT-partitions.

== TIA

[no.to...@gmail.com]

In article <slrnjor0m...@charlotte.encs.concordia.ca>, Sylvain Robitaille <s...@alcor.concordia.ca> wrote:

> On Tue, 17 Apr 2012 06:17:49 +0000 (UTC), no.to...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> >> Booting is not distribution-specific. If one can do it, they all
> >> can do it.
> > By 'boot' I mean the total process from power-up till 'login'
>
> So do I.
>
> -[snip]-
> > I think I read that slak13's HUGE kernel doesn't need an <initrd>
>
> That may be true in most cases, but it might be worth your while to
> check if there's a driver there that can see a CF drive as a SCSI disk
> without loading any modules. I suspect it might still need an
> additional module or more.
>
> > But I guess that vmlinuz-huge-smp-2.6.29.6-smp
> > lacks the SCSI driver for the CompactFlash.
>
> I think that's a reasonable guess. I'd even say the evidence you've
> presented points quite clearly in that direction.
>
> -[snip]-
>
> Best to stick with one combination and eliminate as many variables
> as you can. Since you have it working on the PC, you don't need to
> consider any combination that includes that, unless the PC's hardware
> is identical to the netbook's.
>
> What you want is to have the netbook working. I would concentrate
> on Netbook+Slackware+LILO. You need to find out what modules are
> required for the kernel to see your CF drive as a SCSI disk, make an
> initrd that includes those, and point LILO to that initrd.
>
> Other distributions won't help, other than they might help you
> determine what's needed to make it work. But you can't compare
> non-Slackware to Slackware and wonder why they don't behave the same.
> The answer is simple: they don't behave the same because they aren't
> the same. Still, what you're trying to do is certainly possible.
>
I can't afford the comfort of a single goal.
If that goal fails, there's no planB & planC to pay for the expensive
journey. Besides Debian-Etch /dev/sdd1 is the only one bootable,
to allow me to see the contents and experiment with `grub`, and
DebLenny @ sdc2 has got a working `mc` and `gpm` and `gpm`
doubles your power; kogi & sdb? has got a slak13-based initrd.gz,
and slak13 @ sdc3 is the goal. Real life is complex.

So I'm taking this thread to alt.os.linux.debian too and hoping
for some input from there.

== TIA.