Thank you for the response, Steve. I was actually not yet at the point where the kernel was able to log messages to disk. In the boot process, I don't believe the kernel had yet made the switch from the ramdisk over to the root filesystem on disk.
On another post, some members informed me that my initial question here was too vague. They said I should follow the guidelines given at "
Welcome to LQ". The first bullet point there says, "You should include the distribution and version you're using..." However, at this point, I'm not interested in using a distribution. So I did some Google searching on the topic of using Linux without a distro and came across LinuxFromScratch.org. I believe that site provides the information for which I was looking to get me started on building a lightweight root file system that I can use for booting.
The other problem I mentioned in my original post was that I don't know what to do when error messages during boot run off the screen. Someone pointed me to
this post at Stack Overflow when having this problem while using QEMU, which has worked for me. I still am not sure how to deal with it when not using an emulator (i.e. booting on real hardware). Someone recommended to me netconsole, but I still need to look into that.
Thanks,
Patrick
