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Author Topic: hda1 not mounted !  (Read 3774 times)

Offline ACRizona

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hda1 not mounted !
« on: August 04, 2010, 04:44:01 PM »
WhattaUmean  ???  I'm booted and running from it !

Cpanel / MountTool shows hda1 in RED

I just re-partitioned,re-formatted the disk, and installed from scratch.

What gives ?

Offline tinypoodle

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Re: hda1 not mounted !
« Reply #1 on: August 04, 2010, 04:51:57 PM »
Code: [Select]
mount |grep da
?
"Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster." Niklaus Wirth - A Plea for Lean Software (1995)

Offline ixbrian

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Re: hda1 not mounted !
« Reply #2 on: August 04, 2010, 04:58:59 PM »
WhattaUmean  ???  I'm booted and running from it !

Cpanel / MountTool shows hda1 in RED

I just re-partitioned,re-formatted the disk, and installed from scratch.

What gives ?

When your boot loader boots Tiny Core, it uses the bzImage as the Kernel and the tinycore.gz as the initrd, and both of these are loaded in to RAM, so hda1 isn't mounted when you boot because everything is in RAM at that point. 

Offline ACRizona

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Re: hda1 not mounted !
« Reply #3 on: August 04, 2010, 05:10:37 PM »
This does nothing;

mount |grep da
?



--------------------------------------------------
"All in memory".    I wonder how it got there without hda1 ?

Offline althalus

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Re: hda1 not mounted !
« Reply #4 on: August 04, 2010, 05:25:26 PM »
The boot loader is entirely separate to tinycore itself. The boot loader loads bzImage and kernel image from your hard drive, not TC. The boot loader accessing your hard drive is not the same thing as mounting a drive in linux.

Offline ixbrian

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Re: hda1 not mounted !
« Reply #5 on: August 04, 2010, 05:26:02 PM »
"All in memory".    I wonder how it got there without hda1 ?

The bootloader (example: grub) reads hda1 and copies bzImage and the initrd (tinycore.gz) to memory.  At that point, the bootloader hands over control to the Linux kernel which uses the tinycore.gz initrd as the root filesystem.  

It is just like booting up the tinycore ISO image from a CDROM drive..  The CD will not be mounted after the system is booted and after it is booted you are free to remove the CD from the drive.  

In traditional versions of Linux (RHEL, Debian, etc.) things work differently.  The boot loader stills loads the kernel and an initrd in to memory, but the main function of the initrd is to have the kernel modules necessary to mount the "real" root filesystem which is on a disk.   Tiny core doesn't have a "real" root filesystem anywhere on disk to mount, its entire root filesystem is the initrd, and therefor is in RAM (initrd is short for initial RAM disk).
« Last Edit: August 04, 2010, 05:58:03 PM by ixbrian »

Offline tinypoodle

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Re: hda1 not mounted !
« Reply #6 on: August 04, 2010, 06:35:22 PM »
This does nothing;

mount |grep da
?

It did exactly what it had to: show no output (as opposed to if a partition would have been mounted)  ;)
You could just
Code: [Select]
mount
but the output can get particularly noisy in TC (due to loops) - depending on setup

In traditional versions of Linux (RHEL, Debian, etc.) things work differently.  The boot loader stills loads the kernel and an initrd in to memory, but the main function of the initrd is to have the kernel modules necessary to mount the "real" root filesystem which is on a disk.
I thought the really traditional way of booting wouldn't include any initrd at all.
"Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster." Niklaus Wirth - A Plea for Lean Software (1995)

Offline ixbrian

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Re: hda1 not mounted !
« Reply #7 on: August 04, 2010, 07:12:45 PM »
In traditional versions of Linux (RHEL, Debian, etc.) things work differently.  The boot loader stills loads the kernel and an initrd in to memory, but the main function of the initrd is to have the kernel modules necessary to mount the "real" root filesystem which is on a disk.
I thought the really traditional way of booting wouldn't include any initrd at all.

An initrd/initramfs isn't required to boot Linux, but all of the major distro's I have seen use an initrd/initramfs so that the kernel doesn't have to be compiled with support for every possible SCSI card, LVM, RAID,  etc.. (instead those can be modules loaded as needed in the initrd/initramfs)

Offline ACRizona

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Never mind.......
« Reply #8 on: August 04, 2010, 11:00:44 PM »
I re-formatted and used a completely different CD.

Now I have C: and D:

 ;D