[BusyBox] cannot get BusyBox to boot

[Christoph Hanslik]

Dear List,
I am very desperate, cannot get BusyBox to boot, seems that init does not run.

To build the ramdisk image I followed the losetup man page and the hints of
the kernel docs ramdisk.txt and initrd.txt.

The kernel is: 2.6.8.1, the file command says:
/boot/vmlinuz: Linux/x86 Kernel, Setup Version 0x203, bzImage, Version 
2.6.8.1, RO-rootFS, root_dev 0x100, RAMdisksize 16384 kB, Video mode 791

I poked the root_dev, RAMdisksize and Video mode with the rdev command, but 
with the commandline parameters in grub's menu.lst file I got no better 
results.

Tried it with hard links and symbolic links, with inittab and without 
inittab..., dynamically executable and static ...
I read everything about "init" in the list archives of the last 4 month but 
got no hint to get it booting.
I have the example of ttylinux, that boots, but when I replace the busybox 
executable with the one fitting my configuration, it agabin does not boot.

What the kernel says about loading the ramdisk:

RAMDISK: ext2 filesystem found at block 0
RAMDISK: Loading 8192 blocks [1 disk] into ram disk... done.
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
Freeing unused kernel memory: 188k freed

(then big slience, here I expect the /sbin/init to work and print out the
echos of the /etc/init.d/rcS script ...)
The fun is that ctrlaltdel is working.

Any hints which tell me what I am doing wrongly with BusyBox will be 
appreciated!

Christoph Hanslik

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