Quote Originally Posted by garyng
Why does a HD install requires initrd ? It is not needed in general unless you have some special needs like your root partition is on a SCSI/RAID device that the bios don't know how to boot from.

just curious.
It's the way Klaus built the kernel the file systems are loaded as modules not compiled into the kernel therefore you need an initrd (initial root device) to be able to load the file systems otherwise you could not boot.