from reiser to ext3 at boot

[hicksjo]

Hello,

Is it possible to pass the type of root filesystem on at the boot and bypass the initrd?

I ask this because I've recovered a former Reiserfs partition and I thought I'd try and save the entire directory structure. I converted (dd_rescue) the damaged partition to an image then copied the rebuilt-tree data to a new hard drive. In the absence of any problems with the bzImage when Reiser fell apart, this would be a simple fix.

The grub line reads like usual

kernel (hd1,0)/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12 root=/dev/sdb1

I have tried to boot without the initrd, but that just leads to other problems.

I know I could mount the drive on another system and use chroot to make a new initrd (mkinitrd), but I am curious about other possibilities.

Thanks, j

[synss]

you might need an initrd for reiser b/c you need to load the support for your filesystem at boot

you do not need the initrd at all with ext3, you just compile the support for it in your kernel and it should boot

then, if /boot is on a separate partition, you should probably use ext2 and mount it with noauto in your /etc/fstab for both perf and safety, having a journal on a partition that is unmounted most of the time is useless