Re: [SLE] whats a RAMDISK and why is it compressed?

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>>>>>>>>>>>> Original Message <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

On 18/04/2001, 11:49:20, jennifer moter wrote regarding Re: [SLE] whats a RAMDISK and why is it compressed?:

On Wednesday 18 April 2001 02:21, you wrote:

That was incredibly quick. Makes sense also, I didn't have a new floppy around ( who uses floppies nowadays?) so I did a reformat on an old one. I'll look up mk_initrd tomorrow.

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But first a little question, why are you booting of a floppy and not your HD?

I've got Win2K on the main partition with my work environment on it- its a fat32, so linux can't live there.

Just a second... you've got win2k and linux on the same harddrive, each in their own partition. and win2k is on a fat32 filesystem. So, you should be able to use lilo for booting both w2k and linux. I'm using it here (at work) to boot SuSE 7.1 and NT 4.0... works fine with W95 and 98 too. 2000 shouldn't be to different, but you better check on the internet. (in case anything goes wrong, keep a windows boot-disk at hand with fdisk on it... boot to DOS and run 'fdisk /mbr' to remove lilo. It'll be a lot faster booting from hard-disk.

I've read that its possible to get the NT loader to call linux from another partition, but I haven't gotten around to that yet.

Or the other way arround ;-)

What do you think of the current crop of manuals?

The manuals that came with 7.1 are very good, specially considering the price of the distro... If you want to do more advanced stuff, some extra reading can be handy... O'Reilly's got a line of Linux books (I'm currently reading 'Linux Network Administrators guide 2nd edition', quite good so far).

Is linux is BSD or SysV.

Good question, and quite frankly.... I don't know :-(

Thanks again jennifer

btw, I took a look at your company's site. great prices! What site do you mean? my e-mail address is a free one, from crosswinds... We're on exchange servers over here... if I have the list send to my real address, they would crash...

Here's some average listings from my area http://www.alamedarealty.com/listings.html

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That aside, a ramdisk is a virtual partition, created in your RAM memory at boot-time. When the kernel first boots, only the /boot partition is available to it, but the modules are located in /lib/modules/... Therefor, a RAMDisk image (a gzipped file actually, that's the compression) is created in /boot. During the initial bootphase, it is extraced to that virual disk in the RAM, therefor called a ramdisk.

The reason booting the standard kernel takes as long is probably that the ramdisk is rather large, if you add the fact that it is on a floppy and has to be decompressed... It's also possible that it contains errors, or the floppy itself is damaged (which would explain why you can't mount it)

You can rebuild the ramdisks in /boot automatically with mk_initrd (for the floppy, you'll probably need to add parameters).

The unchecked fs is another thing. The error just says it mounted a filesystems which wasn't checked by fsck, to go into this further, you should find out what filesystem it is (mountpoint, type), and what the settings in fstab are.

I hope this helps

Kind regards

Guy

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>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Original Message <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

On 18/04/2001, 10:28:42, jennifer moter wrote

regarding [SLE] whats a RAMDISK and why is it compressed?:

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I have another one. I think this one is pretty strange, and so far, this list has better, answers than I can get from suse

support,

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so here goes...

I installed lilo on a floppy. When the penguin menu comes up, the 1st

two

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choices are 'linux' and 'linux 24'. If I pick linux, it goes through the normal boot messages, then it

says

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<5>RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0

<4>Uncompressing.......................................................

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.........................

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and the dots continue. I've let it run 10 minutes before I rebooted with 3 fingers

If I pick linux24, it gets to the same place in boot, then does this: <5>RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0

<4>Uncompressing.......................................................

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.........................<3>crcerrordone.

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and finishes the boot, with this warning: <4>EXT2-fs warning: mounting unchecked fs, running e2fsck is

recommended

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What's going on? Does the <4> mean that this is run level 4? Whats a RAMDISK? If its like a swapfile, can I rewrite or move it?

Also, I tried to look at the files on the boot floppy, but I get a

message

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from KDesktop that the floppy couldn't be mounted: ' could not

determin file

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filesystem type and none was specified.' How do I fix this?

One more - Is there a manual I can buy that will tell me the correct

paths

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to system files and programs that suse uses? I've been using the Prentice Hall Unix system admin book and oReilly's

Motif

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User's guide, but neither of these are a good fit.

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