I'm at my wits end, as well as a deadline, and I have done everything I could to figure this out, and now I must turn to those more knowledgable. I need to create a cdrom that will boot into a command prompt, automatically run a script that simply creates an ext2 filesystem on a hard drive, then untar a tarball onto the hard drive. I have been to countless websites explaining how to do this with ISOLINUX, but I have not been able to do it correctly a single time. The closest I have ever gotten with it, was when it started to boot the kernel, and then decides it can't load the root filesystem. I have tried the line
append root=/dev/hdc
and
append root=/dev/ram1
in the isolinux.cfg file, and it continually fails regardless. i am using initrd.gz in there, as all the tutorials seem to want, but I just can't make this work. I would really appreciate the help of anyone who knows how to do this, a simple description of the commands used or a website of a tutorial (the ones I'm using can be really vague on what I still see as very complex steps in this). In short, I need to be able to make the disk load up to a shell, run a script, create a filesystem on a hard drive, and untar a tarball that will be included in the cdrom image i want to make. The hard drive will always be the same model, if it makes any difference.
I have tried the steps at
www.syslinux.com, the BOOTDISK HOWTO at tldp.org, and a few tutorials on this subject at linuxjournal as well. If i could just know how to boot into a shell from the disk, instead of either getting an error or having it ask for a root floppy, I could figure the rest out. The error is a kernel panic, by the way, saying something about VFS and can't mount the root filesystem, although it does say VFS: root mounted a few lines above the kernel panic. Thanks for reading this, this is really driving me crazy, and I have a deadline to finish it coming rapidly, so any help would really be welcome about now.
The main tutorial i'm using is this one
http://www.geocities.com/potato.geo/...nuxcd-old.html
I'm stuck at the point where you are to burn an initrd and kernel only cd. According to the tutorial, I'm supposed to be dropped into a shell. I suspect the problem is my linuxrc script, as the tutorial only says to put in in the /isolinux/boot/iso/initrd directory, which is not used when creating the image. I have tried replacing the /boot/initrd-tree/rclinux script with it, then making the initrd with the command
mkinitrd initrd.gz
but that makes no difference at all. I get the feeling that if the script were working though, this would all work just fine, and i could finish my work. Unfortunately, his example is no longer up on the site, and i cant reference it.