"Junk in compressed archive" or "No CPIO magic" - scratch RAMfs

Question

Howdy folks,
I have picked up some inspiration as a result of my workplace recently deploying Dell Wyse clients running Windows Embedded Standard 7 with only MS Remote Desktop accessible. After about 6 months of using one of these devices I have harboured the desire to try and accomplish a similar result but by using Linux instead and after browsing the web for distros, I found you guys and Arch Linux.
To make learning easier on my part, I am adopting the "walk along the while line with the system" approach so I can understand what starts what.
So far, without any aid from anyone, I have managed to put together a working stripped down super-simple five-file, one-folder "first stage" PXELINUX bootloader configuration based on the 2015-02-01 ISO release with the total size just under 4MB. This is what is in my config file contains right now:
PROMPT 0
NOESCAPE 1
DEFAULT n
LABEL n
KERNEL vmlinuz
APPEND initrd=filesys.img ro
The end result I am trying to achieve is a reduced-UI graphical OS that is "in-RAM and only RAM" system (with all other storage devices ignored and not accessible or mounted) showing only these desktop icons (no right-click possible with no showing taskbars or the like) with the smallest footprint possible:
Remote Desktop
Sound
Display
Mouse
Keyboard
Sleep (suspend)
Restart
Turn Off
I am currently stuck at the ram disk image phase battling "Junk in compressed archive" or "No CPIO magic" errors.
Has anybody got any advice to share with this rather rusty codger? (I would appreciate that you would refer if possible to the Windows versions of any tools as I am not comfortable yet with the terminology differences)
Bless you all.
(Dear admins and moderators, if I have created this topic in the wrong place, I wish to offer my deepest apologies in advance.)
EDIT: Topic title modified at moderator's advice
Last edited by icbrainy (2015-02-10 16:15:28)

Answer 1

My apologies jasonwryan. I've edited it as instructed.
Yes, I am having a problem with the 2015-02-01 kernel returning either "Junk in compressed archive" or "No CPIO magic" with this at the end:
end Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)
What I am trying to do is assemble a file system (init starting point and such) from a blank slate, not from a pre-built image. I'm using the GnuWin CPIO command-line archive utility to make the CPIO archive. Any idea on what I'm doing incorrectly?
Because I am doing this all in a VMware player virtual machine, I can't copy the entire kernel panic error.