Starting with the Debian Potato Rescue/Root disks, I replaced the kernel
with a custom build of 2.2.14 with Ingo's patches. I booted from this
modified Debian install set and (using fdisk) manually created two type
0xFD partitions, /dev/hda1 and /dev/hdc2. I then ran mkraid and linked
these two partitions together into /dev/md0.
Everything basically seems to work. From that point, I more or less ran
the standard Debian install (from floppy) and made a boot floppy. (I knew
Lilo would not work yet, at least not without a version upgrade, but this
is minor.) The Debian installation program generated a boot floppy with
my kernel, which is loaded using SYSLINUX v1.48. Using mknod, I manually
created the /dev/md0 block device map on the target.
Unfortunately, the boot floppy fails out with a kernel panic about being
unable to mount the root filesystem. The ssyslinux.cfg file does
correctly specify "root=/dev/md0" and the VFS message reports that it
cannot mount 09:00 because there is no valid superblock. The kernel
messages up to that point clearly indicated that RAID-1 support was
running and that the mirror was being managed. If I boot using the
install set (with the same customer kernel), /dev/md0 can be mounted and
used. What's going on here?
-- Mike
