After further investigation, it appears that the "ready made" initrd image is compressed with lzma and cpio. In order to extract it, one must rename it to initrd.lzma or else lzma will complain.
$lzma d initrd.lzma initrd
will un"lzma" it, leaving you with a cpio compressed archive. You can further decompress it into the file hierarchy with
$cpio -i < initrd
To rebuild the image (I have rebuilt it, but not yet tested--that will happen tomorrow), one should be able to do the following: $find ./ | cpio -H newc -o > initrd $lzma e initrd initrd.lzma $mv initrd.lzma initrd
and they will <should> have a factory like initrd image.
If someone does not have lzma, it is freely available. I found that the README (http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/download/Development/Patches/lzmastuff/README) was most helpful, as the traditional ./configure; make; make install did not quite cut it.
I will update tomorrow as to whether or not this procedure was successful.
------------------------------ Greg Hasseler SUNYIT Computer Science Department
I'm telling you that the kernel is stable not because it's a kernel, but because I refuse to listen to arguments like this. -- Linus Torvalds