extract Embedded initramfs

There is some information about this in the gentoo wiki: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Custom_Initramfs#Salvaging

It recommends the usage of binwalk which works exceedingly well.

I'll give a quick walk-through with an example:

first extract the bzImage file with binwalk:

> binwalk --extract bzImage
DECIMAL       HEXADECIMAL     DESCRIPTION
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
0             0x0             Microsoft executable, portable (PE)
18356         0x47B4          xz compressed data
9772088       0x951C38        xz compressed data

I ended up with three files: 47B4, 47B4.xz and 951C38.xz

> file 47B4
47B4: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, BuildID[sha1]=aa47c6853b19e9242401db60d6ce12fe84814020, stripped

Now lets run binwalk again on 47B4:

> binwalk --extract 47B4
DECIMAL       HEXADECIMAL     DESCRIPTION
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
0             0x0             ELF, 64-bit LSB executable, AMD x86-64, version 1 (SYSV)
9818304       0x95D0C0        Linux kernel version "4.4.6-gentoo (root@host) (gcc version 4.9.3 (Gentoo Hardened 4.9.3 p1.5, pie-0.6.4) ) #1 SMP Tue Apr 12 14:55:10 CEST 2016"
9977288       0x983DC8        gzip compressed data, maximum compression, from Unix, NULL date (1970-01-01 00:00:00)
<snip>

This came back with a long list of found paths and several potentially interesting files. Lets have a look.

> file _47B4.extracted/*
<snip>
_47B4.extracted/E9B348:     ASCII cpio archive (SVR4 with no CRC)

file E9B348 is a (already decompressed) cpio archive, just what we are looking for! Bingo!

To unpack the uncompressed cpio archive (your initramfs!) in your current directory just run

> cpio -i < E9B348

That was almost too easy. binwalk is absolutely the tool you are looking for. For reference, I was using v2.1.1 here.

As far as I know, the initramfs cpio archive is just linked into the kernel.

Hence, this should work:

1. use dd to extract the range between c17fd8cc and c19d7b90
2. unpack the resulting data ny using an CPIO unpacker.