[lug] Reiserfs and lilo 2.0

[D. Stimits]

I have not yet tried to work with reiserfs, though I keep telling myself
I will soon. What you probably need is mkinitrd. Be sure to name your
initial ramdisk in lilo.conf as well.

Installer wrote:
> 
> For the past few days I've been on a merry-go-round attempting to convert
> my root partition to reiserfs.  At boot time I am unable to mount a root
> partition which has been formatted for reiserfs.
> 
> My system specifics are:
> 
> SuSE7.0 with lilo 21
> 
> 2 SCSI disks
> 
> /etc/fstab:
> 
> /dev/sda2       swap                      swap            defaults   0   0
> /dev/sda5       /                         reiserfs        defaults   1   1
> /dev/sda1       /boot                     ext2            defaults   1   2
> 
> I did a clean install to a new SCSI drive (which is reflected in the fstab
> file above).  SuSE7.0 installs with a 2.2.16 kernel patched for reiserfs
> (/boot/vmlinuz).  The system boots fine from their install, which
> evidently uses a ramdisk.  I have compiled a generic 2.2.18 kernel with
> reiserfs patch 3.5.29, which I have installed and working with lilo 21.
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> I've copied /etc/fstab from the working SuSE install to the old disk and
> adapted it to the partition scheme
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> When I boot from the new installation with the patched kernel I get a
> kernel panic when it tries to mount the reiserfs root partition.  I am
> able to boot from the distro CD's and mount all partitions with the SuSE
> 2.2.16 kernel.
> 
> I am also able to boot from the non-reiserfs disk, with the same patched
> 2.2.18 kernel.  Then I can mount the reiserfs partition on the new disk
> just fine, so it's not a kernel problem.
> 
> While reading some SuSE list archives I saw that a number of people are
> successfully booting from reiserfs root partitions after upgrading lilo to
> current verions, so I thought it might be a good idea to upgrade lilo as
> well (21.6.1).  So I DL'd it and compiled from source.
> 
> Then I encounter a second problem: lilo then chokes on the kernel saying
> that it has an invalid compression type and halts.  The kernel is compiled
> to bzImage.  I can't compile to zImage, as it is too big to link.  The
> docs included with the lilo source say nothing about this kind of
> incompatibility.
> 
> Anybody here run into any of this in converting to reiserfs?  I can't just
> stick with the SuSE 2.2.16 either, as it's vmware incompatible.
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> John Karns                                              jkarns at csd.net
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Web Page:  http://lug.boulder.co.us
> Mailing List: http://lists.lug.boulder.co.us/mailman/listinfo/lug