Eh, I found the problem(s) :-)) Firstly, I discovered the following message displayed at boot time:
initrd overwritten (0xf0300000 < 0xf03081a0) - disabling it. Not very nice, isn't it :-( It seemed my kernel was too big (1.6MB). I then removed a few options and rebuilt a smaller kernel. Now it is 1.4MB and the message was changed to: RAMDISK: Couldn't find valid ramdisk image starting at 0. I tracked down the problem and found why the ramdisk couldn't be loaded. It was a big endian problem while attempting to detect the type of the filesystem which is on the ramdisk. In fact it is only a 2.0.35 problem. I checked the 2.1.125 source tree and found the fix there. Now I can load an initial ramdisk with SILO :-)) Here is the patch for 2.0 series: --- kernel-source-2.0.35/drivers/block/rd.c.orig Tue Jan 19 23:39:58 1999 +++ kernel-source-2.0.35/drivers/block/rd.c Tue Jan 19 23:40:02 1999 @@ -389,11 +389,11 @@ } /* Try ext2 */ - if (ext2sb->s_magic == EXT2_SUPER_MAGIC) { + if (ext2sb->s_magic == swab16(EXT2_SUPER_MAGIC)) { printk(KERN_NOTICE "RAMDISK: Ext2 filesystem found at block %d\n", start_block); - nblocks = ext2sb->s_blocks_count; + nblocks = swab32(ext2sb->s_blocks_count); goto done; } printk(KERN_NOTICE I ran these tests with the SILO boot loader from my hard disk. My next attempt will be to burn a new CDROM to check whether it still works here... Regards. -- Eric Delaunay | "La guerre justifie l'existence des militaires. [EMAIL PROTECTED] | En les supprimant." Henri Jeanson (1900-1970)