Help - initrd..

[Andrew Hall]

I have a problem that I have been wrestling with now for a number of days with no solution, and I'm hoping someone can help. I have a stock 2.2.20 kernel with ramdisk and initrd support compiled in. RAMdisk size is 64MB although I've also tried 32MB and 128MB. I have tried kernel builds with module support and without (everything compiled in) I'm using the latest lilo I can find with the following config: boot=/dev/hdc disk=/dev/hdc  bios=0x80 map=/map install=/boot.b backup=/boot.1600 prompt linear timeout=50 password=maintenance restricted image=/vmlinuz-2.2.20up         label=test         ramdisk=65536         initrd=/rootfs.img         root=/dev/ram The server is a uni processor PIII server with 512MB of RAM The sizes of my rootfs.img and kernel are:  8713856 Aug  7 12:55 rootfs.img (this is an ext2 compressed image)  787022 Aug  7 12:17 vmlinuz-2.2.20up (this is a monolithic bzImage kernel) My problem is that when my kernel loads, sometimes lilo doesn't seem to load the rootfs.img into RAM for the kernel to find. That is I don't get the kernel message 'RAMDISK found at 0' message and thus Linux panics with something like "root file system not found on dev 1:0". Lilo when building doesn't report any errors in fact it says it successfully maps the RAMdisk ok The only trick that I have been able to use to get around it, is to selectively remove some files OR selectively remove some kernel components when compiling - but it's not consistent. It almost seems like there is some finite size limit that my rootfs.img+kernel is greater than that stops the RAMdisk being loaded or being found if it is infact being loaded. I have not tried a 2.4 level kernel as I need this to work consistently with 2.2. Any help much appreciated. Andrew.