On Oct 29, 2005, at 10:52 pm, A. Khattri wrote:
On Sun, 30 Oct 2005, Richard Watson wrote:
Hi - I have an old Sony Vaio I thought to run Gentoo on with X. The CD
drive is attached to a PCMCIA card. When the LiveCD boots it seems to
go
OK up until mounting root at which point I get the error "The Root
Block
Device is unspecified or not detected " and then I'm offerred to
either
shell or specify a /dev. I've tried gentoo-nofb dopcmcia ide=nodma but
no luck. I'm a bit stuck at this point does anyone have any
suggestions
how I could make the install CD boot? Thanks, Richard
What sort of PCMCIA card? SCSI?
I have this idea it's not SCSI.
Sony sold this CD-ROM-on-a-string for their sub-notebook Viaos of the
PII - PIII era. I think the PMCIA card & optical driver were both
hardwired to the cable and it was certainly never implied that the
PCMCIA card might be used with any other kind of drive. Google finds a
photo at http://www.allnotebooks.ru/img/compl/51.gif
I installed Gentoo on a Pentium II 400 Vaio "Picturebook", the Sony
with a 6" widescreen (1024 x 480??) but never had one of these CD-Roms
available, only the floppy drive. In fact I cheated & resorted to
removing the hard-drive & installing Gentoo on it using a desktop PC
before returning the drive to the laptop. I think it might be possible
to avoid this by installing from stage 3 - that mostly just needs to be
unpacked onto a Linux-formatted partition, doesn't it? There are surely
Linux distros that'll boot on this device so a pre-compiled kernel
could be copied across from another machine and then only grub needs to
be run, I think.
Richard: does Knoppix boot from this CD-Rom drive? An Ubuntu LiveCD?
Perhaps it might be worth trying an older (2003, 2004) Gentoo install
CD. A Google for "parallel port cd-rom linux" returns, amongst others,
this page http://cyberelk.net/tim/parport/paride.html so I reckon your
drive is probably supported by the kernel.
Stroller.
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