How do we get out / rid of initramfs ???

[Ken McLennan]

G'day there Svobi,

> Hi Ken
> Thanks for your assistance ;-)
>   
    Your thanks may be premature. I'm not sure that I've assisted yet :)

> With only this single Ubuntu 7.10 on this machine and for experimenting
> I tried to keep the installation simplest with only root & swap but plus
> home !
>   
    Ok, that sounds like the easiest setup to me. You're install should 
have been painless from there.

    May I ask what filesystem your partitions are formatted on? During 
the install did you get your partition manager to format everything?

    If you're using the same partitions that your previous Linux distro 
used, they may be something that the initram thingy can't read. That 
will bring everything to a grinding halt as it won't be able to find the 
root '/' directory and will drop you to an initramfs shell.

    If you're going to reinstall, try using either reiserfs or ext3 as 
your filesystem and format everything. In this case I suggest booting 
from your CD/DVD and when the partition manager comes up, delete all 
your partitions. Then, assuming you're running QParted or Gparted, hit 
the "Apply" button (I think that's what it's called) to write your 
partition table to disk. Then make your partitions as required and 
format them in one of the two filesystems above. Finish your install and 
with luck, all should be OK.

    If you still have problems, then I'm as stuck as you are since I 
know next to nothing about how the initram and the various boot stages 
work. There's a lot of information on the web, and much of it is very 
technical, but I'm sure that this group can help a lot. They've 
certainly helped me before now.
> You encourages me for one more installation with a separate boot ;-)
>   
    A separate boot shouldn't be necessary, but it can't hurt. I only 
had mine set to 50 Meg, and it was a bit small when it came time for a 
dist-upgrade. I came up with a workaround, but it may be easier to just 
make it 100 Meg if you have a large enough hard drive that you can spare 
the space.

> Does it mean that root hasn't to be bootable then ?
>   
    I dunno if it helps or not. Mine isn't and it works fine. But then 
I'm using the Grub bootloader which tells the system where to boot from. 
If you're just going to have a single OS then it probably can't hurt. To 
my knowledge it won't stop your system from working, but it might not do 
anything either.

> TIA for any hints and responses.
>   
    Not a problem. I can't guarantee that there's anything useful here, 
but at least it's something to try. IMHO it's worth sticking with it as 
it seems to be quite a competent OS.

See ya
Good luck =)

Ken McLennan
Qld, Australia