on mon aug NUMBER NUMBER at NUMBER NUMBER NUMBERpm NUMBER john p looney mentioned this is likely because to get it to boot like the cobalt i m actually passing root dev hdaNUMBER to the kernel not dev mdNUMBER just to solve this the reason i was booting the box with root dev hdaNUMBER not dev mdNUMBER was because dev mdNUMBER wasn t booting it would barf with can t find init it turns out that this is because i was populating mdNUMBER with tar which seems to have issues with crosslinked files for instance it was trying to make a hard link of URL to hda and failing it was only as i did it again with a friend present that he spotted the errors and queried them we noticed that the hard linked files just didn t exist on the new rootfs when we duplicated the filesystems with dump instead of tar it worked fine i was able to tell lilo to use root dev mdNUMBER and everything worked woohoo kate irish linux users group ilug URL URL for un subscription information list maintainer listmaster URL 