After a long battle with technology, Mike Bushroe wrote:
> My copy of Ubuntu was becoming unstable. First it would not read a CD-ROM,
> then it would not read a USB flash drive. In both cases, it claimed the
> file system was unknown. So I tried using modprobe to add iso9660 and vfat
> back into the OS, only to find that modprobe was missing.
That should never happen. modprobe is part of module-init-tools, which is
necessary for the base system to work.
> So I decided to bite the bullet and try making a new kernel in hopes of
> restoring the lost modprobe.
Wrong package. "apt-cache search module-init-tools" should tell you what the
right thing to reinstall is.
> I finally edited /grub/menu.lst to add the new kernel, but used the
> most recent image file for the initial ramdisk install phase.
That'd never work, because the modules in the initrd won't match the kernel
you've compiled.
You don't actually *need* an initrd if you build your kernel properly and you
don't have / on an LV. I've never used an initrd on my home boxes and don't
have mkinitrd on my Gentoo systems. (mkinitrd is its own package in Gentoo,
YDistroMV.) For an initrd-less setup, you need to have all the stuff you
need to mount / built in to the kernel, [*], not [M]. This typically means
support for your disk controller, SCSI (or IDE) support, SCSI (or IDE) disk
support, support for ELF binaries, and support for the filesystem on / . Add
softRAID if your / is on a softRAID. LVM requires a bunch of userspace
fiddling, which is why my / is on a regular partition instead of an LV.
> Or does Ubuntu just plain not allow home-rolled kernels?
ISTR running into some stupid problems trying to get a vanilla kernel without
initrd to work with the Ubuntu boot scripts. This was 1.5 years ago though,
so they may have changed everything so it'll work better by now.
--
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog
it's too dark to read.
My blog:
http://crow202.org/wordpress/
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
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