Hey all,

I have two different kernels on my PC (the original one and one I compiled).
The one I made stops booting after displaying "Uncompressing Linux...Ok, booting the kernel".

People told me it is related to my ramdisk, which probably does not contain the good modules.

To verify this, I am wondering: is there a way to explore my ramdisk ? Is there a way to mount it somewhere and list files in it ?

Thanks

When you compile a kernel you specify what modules you want compiled and whether these modules will be compiled as part of the kernel or whether they will be loadable modules only loaded when needed.

During boot the kernel needs to access the partition which contains /. So the kernel needs driver modules for such things as the hard drive controller, the hard drive, and the file system that / uses. If these modules have been compiled into the kernel then the kernel will boot OK. If these modules are not compiled into the kernel then the boot will fail unless the necessary modules are made available with an initrd. An initrd loads the necessary modules into a ramdisk for the kernel's use during boot.

Have you created an initrd? If so you can find out what modules you have in the initrd from the list of modules you told mkinitrd to include in your initrd. If you have not created an initrd or if you have not told grub to use the initrd you created then there is nothing in the ramdisk.

You should not just assume that the initrd for the old kernel will work for the new kernel. The two kernels are different (or else why did you compile a second kernel?) so the modules included in the initrds may be different.

--------------------------
Steve Stites

By the way, you can explore your initrd by uncompressing it (it's a gzip compression), after that it depends, it could be a file system or a cpio archive, do a "file" on it to be sure...
If it's a file system, just mount it with something like "mount -o FILE /mnt/initrd", if it's a cpio archive, extract its content with something like "cpio -i < FILE".

Thanks for all the info.

I used "make-kpkg --initrd" syntax to compile my kernel. So when you install the .deb kernel package generated by the compilation of the kernel, dpkg calls mkinitramfs to generate a initrd.
As I used the macro "make-kpkg --initrd" I don't know which modules have been included in the initrd.
I did not

I compiled a new kernel because i needed to patch it.
Therefore, I used the previous config file.
Then, with "make menuconfig", I ticked the new feature.
But it seems (I don't know why) that also some options were removed.
I will go on comparing the config of the two kernels.