I have an embedded system that boots off compact flash and runs with the initrd.img ramdisk mounted as root. When booting, it mounts the initrd image ok in read only mode but then when inittab runs, it seems to skip over the first mount command which is
null::sysinit:/bin/mount -o remount,rw /
I have /etc/fstab setup with the correct options as far as I know:
/dev/root / ext2 rw,noauto,noatime 1 1
The system then manages to get me a command prompt and I can then login as root and type the mount command which works without a problem.
Furthermore, this same setup has worked on a seemingly identical piece of target hardware. The difference is that I am creating the boot image from my laptop instead of the usual server that we use. My laptop is running a newer version of grub which I use to make a bootloader for the image. Perhaps I also have a newer version of genext2fs which is used to make the image used as the ramdisk. The server is running FC10 but my laptop is using ubuntu so there must be some differences that I'm overlooking which is affecting mount or inittab. Could it be something to do with /dev/null?
Why isn't the system remounting the ramdisk image and how can I fix it?