tlug: Files needed to boot Linux?

[Neil Booth <NeilB@example.com>]

I think I've sussed LILO out, thanks to people's help earlier. In going
through this, I've learnt

1) There's a bug in LILO when writing MBRs of second drives, in that
they are not bootable for some reason. I hope to try to fix this myself;
I can't believe it's too hard.
2) There's a bug in my Award BIOS. In conjunction with the SCSI card, it
gives me an endless selection of boot sequences, but even when told to
boot from SCSI first, tries to boot from HDD (IDE) first instead.
3) The Award BIOS refuses to attempt a boot from my IDE drive if it
can't find an active partition. This is in spite of their being a
bootable MBR on the IDE which loads the second stage from the SCSI. This
threw me for ages; I was almost on the point of giving up when I marked
an empty partition as active, and it went through fine then.

2) then 1) then 3) meant it took about 20 trial-and-error boots to
figure out what was going on, but it feels good to finally get it
working!

Anyway for my next learning stage and for a bit of fun, in order to
learn what depends on what, I'm trying to discover the very minimum I
need to boot Linux to the command prompt. The reason I bought the IDE
drive in the first place was to play around with Linux, particularly
development kernels, without wrecking a working installation.

I have the following on the IDE drive:-

1) Kernel, boot map etc in /boot
2) In /bin just bash, login and an "sh" symlink just in case
3) In /dev, just console, tty, tty1-6 (probably not all needed)
4) In /etc, just fstab, inittab, passwd and rc.d/rc.sysinit (not
strictly needed, I know)
5) In /sbin, init and mingetty

That's it. I hoped to get to the command prompt, but booting fails just
after the "Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) as read only" and just before
the "INIT version XXX" would appear.

Can anyone think what am I missing from above?

Incidentally, am I right in thinking that a device file is nothing more
than a convenient permission-checking converter from a pathname such as
"/dev/console" to a device major and minor number, which the kernel then
uses to lookup a device driver? Initially I imagined said major and
minor number would be in a file somwhere on the filesystem, but I've
just noticed that many have length 0 so that can't be correct.

I hope to be able to help other people someday, but at the moment it
seems to be all one-way traffic.

Cheers,

Neil.
 
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