I decided it was time to upgrade the kernel on my RH 7.1 box to something a little more recent and start using ext3.

Thankfully up2date did me proud and the upgrade of the kernel went well. This box only has a single root filesystem. I ran tune2fs to convert the root filesystem and rebooted.

When it rebooted the root filesystem got mounted as ext2 not ext3. I did some digging and discovered that the reason is that ext3 is built as a module.

The info I found tells me I need to run mkinitrd to add the ext3 module to the initial ram disk. The problem is that mkinitrd doesn't look like it is working properly.

I run:

mkinitrd /boot/vmlinux-2.4.20-18.7-test 2.4.20-18.7

which runs with no errors. I then look at the contents of /boot:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2993373 May 29 13:56 vmlinux-2.4.20-18.7
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 117494 Jun 14 03:59 vmlinux-2.4.20-18.7-test

vmlinux-2.4.20-18.7 is the initrd that the system is currently booting from and it is nearly 3Mb in size, my newly created initrd is only 117Kb.

Something obviously isn't right with my new initrd, it is just too small.

What am I doing wrong?