mkinitrd unable to determine the root filesystem (JFS)

[Will Deutsch]

mkinitrd was unable to determin the root filesystem.

This is on a dual Opteron with 8GB ram and 2 SATA disks on a SIL SATA controller.

When I reformated the partition to ext3 it worked.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

If I'm not mistaken, the partitioner displays an explicit warning about this if
you try to use JFS for your root filesystem, because this configuration is not
supported by grub.
Was this warning not displayed for you?

That said, mkinitrd should not have a problem with JFS. Could you tell us what
is in /target/etc/fstab and /proc/filesystems at the time of the failure?

[Will Deutsch (wdeutsch)]

I was actually using a pre-formated but uninstalled jfs partition made under
unstable debian off of alioth.

[Malcolm Scott (malcscott)]

I've seen this too - having set up a system with a JFS root filesystem, the jfs
module is not installed in the initramfs. (This is on the Breezy preview release.)

[Malcolm Scott (malcscott)]

...And also, "fstype" run on a JFS partition sets FSTYPE=unknown.

[Jeff Bailey (jbailey)]

This should be working as of current initramfs. Would you mind testing it again?

[Jeff Bailey (jbailey)]

initramfs 0.32 should have the final patch needed for this.

Tks,
Jeff Bailey