ongoing quest for vmware on Fedora Core 1 with 2.6.1 kernel

[Jay Turner]

On Mon, Feb 23, 2004 at 12:55:54PM +0100, Tony Grant wrote:
> Ok I am now trying to build my own 2.6.3 kernel to work around VMware
> 3.2.1 not working with the ones found on people.redhat.com
> 
> And I have rediscovered the joys of the root device not being recognised
> on boot.
> 
> My question : what is wrong with "mount -o loop initrd-2.6.3.img
> /mnt/tmp" ? I am asked for a file system type and... well none are
> recognised.

initrd images are actually gzip'd, so you'll actually need to unzip it
before you will be able to mount it.  'file' will generally point you in
the right direction in these cases:

[heisey (root):~]# file /boot/initrd-2.4.21-9.0.1.EL.img
/boot/initrd-2.4.21-9.0.1.EL.img: gzip compressed data, from Unix, max
compression

Anyway, you'll want to do something like this:

zcat /boot/initrd-2.6.3.img > /tmp/foo
mount -o loop /tmp/foo /mnt/tmp

You can then view the contents of the initrd via the /mnt/tmp mountpoint.

- jkt
-- 
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Jay Turner, QA Technical Lead      jkt at redhat.com             Red Hat, Inc. 

        Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
                                                   - Albert Einstein