iinit panic in 4.3 installation

[whm at megaron.UUCP]

A friend of mine is trying to bring up 4.3 on a 750 and he's getting an
iinit panic upon bringing up the kernel on the mini-root.  He copies the
mini-root to the swap partition using standalone copy, and then boots
the kernel.  The autoconfig stuff seems to go ok and find all the devices
and gets as far as asking for the root device, but when he replies "ra0*"
to this, it gets an iinit panic.  The 4.3 installation instructions say
this panic is due to failure in mounting the root filesystem and basically
imply that it can't happen unless the user has done something wrong,
but I can't see what he's done wrong.

I wondered if the mini-root might have been corrupted somehow, so we tried
copying it to an empty partition using dd and then successfully fsck'd and
mounted it, so it would appear to be ok.

Anybody have any ideas or things to try?  I think the current plan is to
bring up the 4.2 mini-root kernel and try to restore the root dump on
the 4.3 tape with it.  Anybody know if this wouldn't work?
					
					Bill Mitchell
					whm at arizona.edu
					{allegra,cmcl2,ihnp4,noao}!arizona!whm