How do I rebuild the initrd?

[Tom Diehl]

On Wed, 11 Jul 2007, Aaron Konstam wrote:

> On Wed, 2007-07-11 at 01:16 -0400, Tom Diehl wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I need to know if anyone has the magic incantation to get mkinitrd to build a
>> proper initrd from either rescue mode or the live cd. I need to put a drive
>> into another box that has a different disk controller in it.
>>
>> If I boot into rescue mode and setup a chroot, when I run mkinitrd I get
>> an error that says "error opening /sys/block: No such file or directory.
> Do you have a /sys directory on your installation. It is one of those
> pseudo directories like /proc. If not mkdir /sys might be worth doing.

Actually I tried mounting both /proc and /sys inside the chroot. They mounted
OK and the errors went away but the mkinitrd still produced an initrd that
would not boot. :-(

I finally ended up cheating. I fired up the Live cd and mounted all of the
system partitions. Then, I setup a chroot and did an rpm -e kernel*

I then rebooted into Anaconda and told it to upgrade the system to F7. Since
the machine was already an F7 box it simply reinstalled a kernel and updated
the initrd. When I rebooted the machines came up normally. :-)))))

I realize this is kind of a convoluted way to get the machines going again but
it worked.

I would still like to know how to rebuild the initrd but so far no one knows.
It must be some super secret incantation. I suppose if I understood python I
could read the anaconda src and see how they do it but alas I do not speak
python. :-(

For the record, there were 2 machines involved in this, one was F7 and the
other was Centos 5. I used the procedure above to recover both of them
without reinstalling.

Hope this info helps someone else.

Regards,

-- 
Tom Diehl		tdiehl at rogueind.com		Spamtrap address mtd123 at rogueind.com