I have been tinkering with a gentoo*-based mini distro. I updated the kernel and made some customizations but I have been totally unable to mount/extract the inital ramdisk (from /boot/initrd.img). I honestly don't know if this file is old style (mounted block device) or new style (gzipped cpio). I tried every method I could find and I was unable to mount or extract this initrd image!

If you're able to extract or mount this image, please let me know how you did it, so I can give it a try here! Also, let me know how to un-do it, that is how to reassemble the image so I can put it back into service.

Thank you in advance!!!

* I posted this same question to the Gentoo forums, but since this is more of a generic linux question (being about initrd) I figured it was worth a try asking here too, especially since this has been such a stumper for me!

I forgot to post the download URL! Here is the link to my initrd that I am currently unable to mount/extract (even though it works just fine!!)

http://bluegrass.misu.nodak.edu/~col.../proj2/initrd/

http://bluegrass.misu.nodak.edu/~col...trd/initrd.img

The file command doesn't recognize the file. Read through the mkinitrd program to find out how it was produced.

It was supposedly created using standard gentoo tools. It works just fine, I'm just not able to actually extract or mount it! I'm totally baffled by why I can't get in!