[KLUG Members] Re: Laptop reiser corruption and fixing it

[Bruce Smith]

> >   # ls -ld /initrd
> >   drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root         1024 Jun 21  2001 /initrd
> > Now you've seen one!  :-)   (BTW, it's empty)
> 
> In addition to my 7.2 system, both my Debian 3.0 and RedHat 7.1
> systems have it too!  But RedHat 6.2 doesn't. 

Maybe it's a 2.4 kernel thing?

> I didn't know about this (doh!).

I didn't either, until I learned about it the HARD WAY last week.

Hopefully this thread will save someone else the hours I spent trying to
figure out why my system wouldn't boot.  I didn't even remember removing
the /initrd directory, but I probably did while I was cleaning up.

Want to know how I figured it out?  The system messages didn't help!

I had an old RH 7.1 partition left over that would still boot (thanks to
the GRUB command line), so I used it to copy my unbootable 7.2 partition
to an IDE drive. (w/tar :)   Then it still wouldn't boot from the IDE
drive when using an "initrd=" on boot, but I finally tried booting the
IDE 7.2 system _without_ the "initrd=..." boot line, and it came up!

After it was up, I still had no idea what was causing this, so I ran:

  rpm -V `rpm -qa`

To see if I had a corrupt file somewhere, and "/initrd/" came up as
missing.  Bingo!!!   :-)

--------------------------------------------
Bruce Smith                bruce@armintl.com
System Administrator / Network Administrator
Armstrong International, Inc.
Three Rivers, Michigan  49093  USA
http://www.armstrong-intl.com/
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