Building a generic initrd.

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi all,

Ok here’s the situation, I have a multi-boot hard disk with OpenSuse 12.2 x86 installed on one of it’s partitions (also has XP and PCDOS), I use this for testing motherboards & computers independent of their own hard disk when needed. The only problem with this is that sometimes I find Suse won’t boot as it can’t find the boot partition, because the wrong IDE device driver is loaded. This can be fixed by booting from an install CD/DVD and re-making initrd, which will detect the correct drivers and rebuild initrd with them built in.

So my question is, is there a way to build an initrd with all the ATA / SATA drivers built in so that it will load on any motherboard (that has a supported chipset), in the same way as the install DVD does ? Alternately is there a generic set of drivers that could be used to boot, don’t even need to be optimized as I’m only using this for testing.

Cheers.

Phill.

2

Don’t have a definitive answer but the default set up is made to store the hardware info for the machine so that boot is faster since the OS does not need to detect the hardware again. iniitrd forces a detection cycle,

If it was me I’d try copying an image of a live DVD to the HD this image is setup to detect hardware on boot rather then installing the OS on the drive.

Note that 12.2 is old and may not work right with newer hardware that requires newer kernels

3

“mkinitrd -A” should help.
From “mkinitrd --help”:

        -A                      Create a so called "monster initrd" which
                                includes all features and modules possible.

Or you can specify specific kernel modules to include with the -m option:

        -m "module list"        Modules to include in initrd. Defaults to the
                                INITRD_MODULES variable in /etc/sysconfig/kernel

As the help text suggests, you can also add kernel modules that should be added to the initrd in /etc/sysconfig/kernel, variable INITRD_MODULES.

4

IMO you should consider upgrading to a version of openSUSE which would be designed around a current kernel version,

In the days of 12.2, many drivers needed to be compiled and added, and many also ran in User space.

Starting somewhere around 3.1x, many drivers that used to be distributed separately and required Users to compile were contributed upstream and made part of the kernel distribution to where nowadays it’s somewhat rare to have to compile your own drivers.

Try LEAP or TW…
You might find that the issue you’re asking about no longer exists.

TSU