F3 initrd strangeness

[Paul Howarth]

T. Horsnell (tsh) wrote:
> I'm having problems building a diskless net-bootable FC3 kernel,
> and decided to take a look inside the vanilla initrd file
> initrd-2.6.9-1.667.img. However, if I gunzip this and try
> to mount it, the mount fails:
> 
> [root at fw1 ~]$ gunzip -c initrd-2.6.9-1.667.img > initrd-2.6.9-1.667
> [root at fw1 ~]$ ls -l initrd-2.6.9-1.667*
> -rw-r--r--  1 root root 1215488 Dec  6 15:29 initrd-2.6.9-1.667
> -rw-r--r--  1 root root  530308 Dec  6 15:29 initrd-2.6.9-1.667.img
> [root at fw1 ~]$ mount -o loop -t ext2 /root/initrd-2.6.9-1.667 /mnt
> mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/loop0,
>        or too many mounted file systems
>        (could this be the IDE device where you in fact use
>        ide-scsi so that sr0 or sda or so is needed?)

$ file /root/initrd-2.6.9-1.667
/root/initrd-2.6.9-1.667: ASCII cpio archive (SVR4 with no CRC)

It's not a filesystem any more, it's just a cpioball.

Paul.