[CentOS] Odd Question... MAX Ram Disk Size

Thu Mar 31 15:06:52 UTC 2005
Scott Heisler <scott.heisler at huntleighusa.com>

Greetings,

Before I get slammed, I've looked all over the internet for the answer
to this (googled and more) and haven't been able to find what I'm
looking for.  Here's what I need.  I have a server that I use to hold
workstation images.  I use a Linux boot CD combined with some scripts I
wrote and some disk imaging software to allow me to image windows
workstations.  Anyway, when I roll out a new workstation Image, I may
roll it out to 20 or 30 computers at once, all using the same image file
(base build).  I want to put that image file on a RAMDISK on my server.
The image file is between 3 and 4 gig.  I have 6 gig in the server, so
plenty of memory.  I modified GRUB to increase the size of my ram
disk... First I started with a 200mb, that worked group, formatted, etc.
Then I tried 1gig - everything looks like it works but when I mount it,
it tells me the volume is not formatted or has invalid super blocks.
Perhaps I'm exceeding the allowable built-in ramdisk limit, but I
couldn't find any docs anywhere that would tell me what that limit was.


Does anyone know of an alternative ramdisk product, that does not load
at boot time, where I could do what I need (as described above)?  Or
does anyone know how I can get a 4-gig Ramdisk to work properly?

I'm running the new CentOS 4 on the server.

Thanks for any help.  I did spend 2 days doing Internet research with no
results, prior to posting here.

Thanks.
Scott