tthorn@daimi.aau.dk: "Building a hd-less bootimage..?" (Nov 27, 18:17):
quoted text
> Hi all (yes, yes, it's me again:-) I still haven't seen Linux run.)
> 
> With the kind help of Galen Hunt, I've succed in building a new boot-
> image. I'm aware that it's most likely my adaptech 1542B that kills
> it, but just commenting hd_init out didn't help. The systems gets
> as far as to 'move_to_user_mode' in main.c.
> 
> I would like to succed with a hd-less Linux, before attempting
> an adaptech driver. Any clues on what to remove/how to build such
> a kernel?

You'll have to comment out all the stuff in "sys_setup" which concerns
harddisks. hd_init() just sets up the interrupt addresses and enables
them, but doesn't read the partition tables etc. The reason is simple:
hd_init() may not sleep, as it is called when we aren't really set up
yet, so it cannot read the disk, just set up for it.

sys_setup mounts the root etc, so you cannot just comment it out
totally, you have to comment out just the partition-reading etc.

		Linus