O método skip do bloco cpio dado não funciona de forma confiável. Isso porque as imagens initrd que eu estava conseguindo não tinham os dois arquivos concatenados em um limite de 512 bytes.
Em vez disso, faça isso:
apt-get install binwalk
legolas [mc]# binwalk initrd.img
DECIMAL HEXADECIMAL DESCRIPTION
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
0 0x0 ASCII cpio archive (SVR4 with no CRC), file name: "kernel", file name length: "0x00000007", file size: "0x00000000"
120 0x78 ASCII cpio archive (SVR4 with no CRC), file name: "kernel/x86", file name length: "0x0000000B", file size: "0x00000000"
244 0xF4 ASCII cpio archive (SVR4 with no CRC), file name: "kernel/x86/microcode", file name length: "0x00000015", file size: "0x00000000"
376 0x178 ASCII cpio archive (SVR4 with no CRC), file name: "kernel/x86/microcode/GenuineIntel.bin", file name length: "0x00000026", file size: "0x00005000"
21004 0x520C ASCII cpio archive (SVR4 with no CRC), file name: "TRAILER!!!", file name length: "0x0000000B", file size: "0x00000000"
21136 0x5290 gzip compressed data, from Unix, last modified: Sat Feb 28 09:46:24 2015
Use o último número (21136) que não está em um limite de 512 bytes para mim:
legolas [mc]# dd if=initrd.img bs=21136 skip=1 | gunzip | cpio -tdv | head
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 0 Feb 28 09:46 .
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 0 Feb 28 09:46 bin
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 554424 Dec 17 2011 bin/busybox
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Feb 28 09:46 bin/sh -> busybox
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 111288 Sep 23 2011 bin/loadkeys
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2800 Aug 19 2013 bin/cat
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 856 Aug 19 2013 bin/chroot
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5224 Aug 19 2013 bin/cpio
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3936 Aug 19 2013 bin/dd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 984 Aug 19 2013 bin/dmesg