[vox-tech] ramdisk error booting Gentoo Linux

[Matt Holland]

The upshot of all of this is that I'm giving up on 2.2 kernels in Gentoo 
for the time being, though if anyone has successfully set up a 2.2 
kernel in a recent Gentoo installation, I would love to see your .config 
and your menu.lst or lilo.conf.  I have the system running with a 2.4 
kernel, and the only open issue is the cd-rom... this isn't a big deal 
since I can still boot from it if necessary, and it'll play audio CDs 
fine.  Still, it's something that I'd like to resolve, as this system 
may eventually see day to day use.

> I would expect it to be in a a startup script and would check your
> /etc/rc?.d or /etc/init.d or whever they are placed. Do a grep for
> "dd" and you may be able to find it.

Yeah, I did that, and it appears that it has something to do with 
initializing the random number generator.  But I don't think this is 
where the problem is... I think it's just the first place where the 
system tries to write to the ramdisk that's supposed to be mounted at 
/mnt/.init.d.  If you look at the original error message, the OOPS comes 
when it tries to mount the ramdisk.

Incidentally, when init fails and it drops me into a shell, I *can* 
create and mount a ramdisk... and write to it, and read from it.  So 
there's definitely ramdisk support in the kernel, as there should be, 
since I enabled it.

[lots of snippage]


> Ah, wait. You *did* copy the System.map file to the (often) /boot
> directory after compiling your kernel, right? I have seen a lack of doing
> this cause some devices to fail. They were mostly ethernet and PCMCIA
> based, but it is still something that should be done. I frequently use a
> different name when I copy it like "System.map.2.2.20" for each kernel
> compiled. (Just an off chance for this CD-ROM issue - not very likely to
> fix it, but checking anyway.)


Uh... probably not, as this instruction has never come up in any of the 
docs I've read about compiling/installing a kernel (maybe I'm reading 
the wrong docs).

Anyway, my tentative conclusion is that the init problems are pretty 
Gentoo specific, so my best chance of figuring them out will be the 
Gentoo lists/forums, which I'll avail myself of as soon as I have the 
time.  The cd-rom issue doesn't seem to be Gentoo specific, however, and 
it really puzzles me.  At first I thought it was just that the drive was 
dying... conceivable since it's going on 6 yrs old.  But the fact that 
it magically worked again the second I stuck it in a machine with a 2.2 
kernel persuaded me to believe that something happened between 2.2 and 
2.4 that left my drive behind (or maybe 2.2 just had better support for 
dying drives).  I dunno, but I do know that I don't have the time to 
deal with it at the moment... so I reserve the right to bring this up 
again.  Bwahahaha!

One last thing... a shameless plug for Gentoo.  This distro (or 
meta-distro, as they like to call it) is really pretty amazing.  It has 
some issues, to be sure.  It's perhaps a little too bleeding-edge for 
many of our tastes, and it can certainly be a pain to have to compile X 
on a Pentium-class machine (though it's possible, and only takes about 
10 hours :) ).  Still, I've learned a lot in the last couple of weeks, 
and I really like the way everything performs, and the potential for 
customization is incredible.

Matt