Hacking the FC boot.iso

[Paul Howarth]

On Wed, 2005-02-23 at 00:54 -0600, Steve Manuel wrote:
> I'm trying to modify the kernel in the FC{2,3} boot.iso but I'm running
> into some problems. I have a Dell PV745 with 4 SATA HD's. As the default
> kernel in the install disk tries to load the sata_vsc module the whole
> thing hangs. Someone on LKM has solved the problem by inabling APIC
> support in the kernel. This isn't in the kernel in boot.iso so
> this means a little hacking of the install disk; no problem.
> 
> Well, not quite. I've successfully un-teased the boot.iso, initrd.img,
> and the modules.cgz. I've rebuilt the kernel from the 2.6.5-1.358
> src.rpm and from 2.6.10 from kernel.org. Both compiled fine. However,
> the problem is that neither kernel (or anaconda) can seem to find the
> kernel modules. I keep seeing that none of the modules needed by probed
> hardware can be found. I've recreated the new modules.cgz *exactly* as
> the old one and it just doesn't work. As there doesn't see to be any
> good instructions on rebuilding just the boot.iso I'm stumped.
> 
> Has anyone rebuilt the boot.iso with a custom kernel? I'd appreciate any
> info you can give.

I've rebuilt a boot.iso with an additional module for the standard
kernel and that worked OK. How did you build the modules.cgz file?

Given a list of files to include in the moduleball (modules-list, one
filename per line), I do it like this:

$ cpio -o --format=crc < modules-list | gzip -c -9 > modules.cgz

If you get it working, please do write up a HOWTO because the question
of how to update the kernel in the installer is asked quite often.

Paul.
-- 
Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>