initrd failing with root=/dev/ram

Brian Geisel (briang@microlite.com)
Tue, 23 Feb 1999 12:53:54 -0500


Greetings,
I've been having a problem while using initrd with LILO. What I'm trying
to do is boot to the initrd image. The documentation in
linux/Documentation/initrd.txt reads:
...
root=/dev/ram
initrd is mounted as root, and /linuxrc is started. If no /linuxrc
exists, the normal boot procedure is followed, with the RAM disk still
mounted as root. This option is mainly useful when booting from a floppy
disk.

...

Now I've tried this with a /linuxrc. It runs linuxrc, exits, and continues
identically to this scenario w/o a /linuxrc file. I get:

RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem).
(linuxrc is executed here if it exists)
[MS-DOS yada yada]
[stuff]
Transaction block size = 512
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 01:01

Now that kernel panic... Shouldn't it just leave the (initrd) ramdisk there
(according to the aforementioned documentation)? Currently the kernel
ramdisk location is 0 and LILO is passing load_ramdisk=0. I suppose a last
resort would be to give the kernel the location of the initrd file (like
LILO does w/ kernels), but I'd rather not. I'm guessing that I'm just
missing something simple and important here.

I should also add that the filesystem is definitely legitimate. If I don't
use LILO and directly tell the kernel where the image is, it works great.
I definitely need LILO here though.

Also note, this behavior is identical on 2.0(.30) and 2.2.

TIA,
geisel

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