x86_64 Live-CD recommendations? /sbin/loader?

[Michael ODonnell]

>> The CentOS5.2 LiveCD-creator kit looked promising until we found
>> bugs that prevent it from running on our bleeding-edge hardware.
>
>  I'm curious.  Got time to provide any details?  In particular, why
>would the regular CentOS install disc work for you when the "live"
>disc would not?  Aren't they basically most of the same pieces, just
>in different places?

The primary problem is related to finding the DVD drives.
On machines with IDE-connected drives it barfs immediately
after starting the kernel from the initrd, but it at least
drops you into a primitive shell where I've discovered that I
can manually create the required entries in /dev to allow the
boot process to continue.  But on machines with SATA-connected
DVD drives I've so far been unable to get the kernel to detect
them at all.  My current suspect is that there's a botch in
the udev rules but I haven't had time to analyze further.

Another gripe is that the DVDs so generated "helpfully"
decide to find all filesystems on all partitions and mount
them without so much as a by-your-leave.  Since some of those
parititions might be (as they are in our case) components
of a software RAID and since the act of mounting them causes
uncoordinated modfications to the mirrors behind MD's back,
we're less than pleased with this "helpful" behavior.

Bug reports have been filed against both problems...