Hi,
Interesting question, had fun looking up why so..., see below.
On Sat, 7 Jun 2003, Satya wrote:
On boot, Debian shows a prompt: wait 5 seconds, or hit enter for a shell prompt. On my system, if I hit enter I get a shell prompt but none of the commands work (everything: not found). Anyway, if I then exit the shell, it eventually says cramfs: wrong magic and kernel panic: unable to mount root fs blah.
Debian apparently uses cramfs for their initrd. Your initrd is loading, but your linuxrc.conf within initrd probably has a (configurable) 5 second delay before it times out and proceeds with rest of the boot. You choose to go to the shell (/bin/dash). The initrd has very little stuff in it, as it should be, so no normally expected utils are there. mount, umount, modprobe, echo and some others should work. When you exit, drivers for your root filesystem are not loaded hence kernel panic.
But if I don't drop to the shell, don't touch anything, it still says cramfs: wrong magic, but boots anyway without any panics. What's going on?
when you let it timeout linuxrc runs rest of the fun stuff, to load your root fs drivers through /sbin/init.
The "cramfs: wrong magic" error is probably because /sbin/init tries to mount your root filesystem as cramfs. See /sbin/init
For all the fun stuff above, do something like, mount -o loop -t cramfs /boot/initrd.img-<kernel-version> /mnt/tmp_mnt/ and walk through linuxrc and init.
Best regards, Rajesh