[syslinux] pxelinux 2.11 unable to mount root fs

[Salman Haq]

Hi,

I've been using PxeLinux to boot our Debian kernel successfully for 
some time now. I recently increased the size of the ramdisk from about 
484 MBs to 517 MBs and encountered the following error during bootup:

---
RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
Freeing initrd memory: 105519k
EXT3-fs: Magic mismatch, very weird!
cramfs: wrong magic
sh-2021: reiserfs_read_super: can not find reiserfs on ramdisk(1,0)
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 01:00
---

I build the ramdisk as follows:

1. run debootstrap in a temporary directory
2. use dd to create a blank 517 MB file
3. format it using mke2fs
4. mount it as ext2
5. copy contents of debootstrapped directory to mounted dd image
6. unmount and compress image using gzip.

My kernel version is 2.4-22, compiled with the HIGHMEM option. The 
target machine has 2 gigs of RAM.

Any ideas why the kernel is not able to uncompress and mount the image?

Thanks,

Salman