[Techtalk] initrd woes

[Maria McKinley]

Greetings,

I am once again trying to boot a machine over the network, and have made 
significant progress, but still hung up.

I've been adding in some debugging statements to my initrd, and here is 
what I have learned:

the root directory is mounted over nfs to /root during the nfs script, 
and remains there through the init-bottom script. One of the parameters 
it uses is a bit strange, but this does not stop it from being mounted. 
For completeness, here is what it is using

nfsmount -o nolock -o ro -o retrans=10.208.108.18:/tftpboot/oscar

which is very strange, since these are the options I give it:

"root=/dev/nfs ip=dhcp nfsroot=10.208.108.18:/tftpboot/oscar"

None the less, it seems to mount just fine. The last command in the 
init-bottom script is
ln -s $rootmnt/dev /dev

where $rootmnt is /root. This command runs successfully, determined by 
adding ls -l /d* to the end of the init-bottom script (it shows a link 
to /root/dev).

After the init-bottom script exits, I get:

mount: mounting /sys on /root/sys failed: No such file or directory
run-init: /sbin/init: No such file or directory
[    11.607804] Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

I have not been able to determine where initrd goes after it finishes 
the init-bottom script, so I don't know where the mount command for /sys 
is given, and not sure how to do any more troubleshooting.

The /sbin/init is living on /root as of the end of the init-bottom 
script, and I guess there is suppose to be a link made for this as well, 
but it looks like this link is never being attempted, maybe because the 
mount /sys command fails?

Any ideas? Any experts on initrd out there?

thanks,
maria