Hey all,

I've spent almost a week now on my linux/ppc experiment, and seemed to be stuck on a ram disk problem.

I've successfully installed Mandrake 8.2 ppc linux (kernel 2.4.18) on a PPC 7350 (workgroup server). I copied the installed kernel + initrd files onto my Mac HFS partition and can successfully boot Linux using the Mac boot loader software BootX installed on MacOS 8.5.

But, I don't want to have the MacOS on there. So, once into Linux I grabbed the quik 2.0e rpm and installed that. I configured it to boot the kernel, then set the proper Open Firmware parameters using 'nvsetenv'.

Upon reboot, second stage of quik finds the kernel and does load it, but the bootup fails w/ a kernel panic while trying to mount root. This is probably due to the fact that the scsi drivers are loaded via modules located in the initrd file. Unfortunately, I've tried all sorts of methods of passing that parameter to the kernel and I just can't get the kernel to recognize the initrd parameter.

I've tried passing in the 'initrd=/boot/initrd.img' in on the second stage boot command line, as well as as 'ramdisk', 'initrd', and even 'append' in the quik.conf. I always rerun quik. I've verified file names, and what's even more weird is the kernel DOES recognize the 'root=/dev/sda5' command I'm passing in. So, I know quik is at least passing some of the kernel parameters in.

So, I guess I'm wondering if quik even supports ramdisks for kernel 2.4, and if so how I'm supposed to specify this to get quik to correctly tell the kernel to use it? I looked through the source for quik and while I'm no C/C++ guru, I did see that quik does have the ability to accept the initrd parameter even though it's not listed in the man pages.

Apologies in advance if this has already been answered/shown someplace. I've looked all over the 'net and while I found a few questions like mine I didn't see any responses/solutions.

Thanks,
Jon