Hi,
I'm currently trying to build a boot disk for use on diskless clients to enable me to make a HPC cluster using openMOSIX.
So far I've compiled a kernel and managed to put it on a disk and boot it successfully.
However the filesystem I'm using has failed to work even after 2 weeks tinkering.
I'm making the disk based on the tldp.org bootdisk-HOWTO and another found at jimweller.net/jim/lfw/; both are similar in there instructions, but which ever I try I get the following error:

Warning: unable to open an initial console
Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel

I've searched google and all advice refers to LILO based disks; I was originally making disks without LILO, just dd'ing the kernel and filesystem to the disk. I've now tried following the advice regarding LILO and still no joy.

To further complicate the issue, when I gzip the filesystem from /dev/ram0 (which weights in at nearly 3.6MB) it ends up at 12KB (in the docs a filesystem is never this small!!), so I'm a bit suspisious.
Further to that when I mount the floppy disk, the filesystem it doesn't even appear.

The commands I'm using to place the kernel and filesystem are:
dd if=bzImagei386tcs of=/dev/fd0 bs=1k
dd if=rootfs.gz of=/dev/fd0 bs=1k seek=830

I had intended to release this on sourceforge since openmosixLOAF is chronically out-of-date, so any help is greatly appreaciated both by myself and potential opnenMOSIX'ers!

thanks for any help.

best regards,

MR835