Just a quick note - not all compact flash cards are created equally.
I've found that several "off-brand" compact flash cards may work in their
intended target (digital cameras), but will NOT work as a "hard disk like
storage device".
If the card contains a sandisk controller or says Sandisk on it, I've never
hand a problem. Some other cards work but give various errors. Still other
cards, once formatted are rendered useless forever more - you want some ?:-)
I use mkfs.ext2 and Lilo to make our CF cards boot...this is from the PeeWee
linux distribution which has scripts to do all the necessary commands required
to embed the system...
Hope this helps
Ralph Stickley
--- Malcolm Dodds <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I'll try to help...
>
> > > I'm wondering if it is possible to boot into Linux from compact flash.
>
> It's not hard at all. It only took me a morning to get it going. It all
> depends whether you know a couple of tricks ( I think!).
>
> > > * A direct copy using 'dd' from a boot floppy to the CF.
>
> The boot sector of the floppy, and all the other filesystem info is set up
> for
> the floppy drive. LILO uses sectors, cylinders, etc. and BIOS calls so must
> be
> run on the compact flash
>
> I'll try to explain what I do to produce a CF image:
> 1/ Put CF as /dev/hdb for example
> 2/ Create boot partition on CF, make filesystem and copy my kernel, etc. onto
> this
> 3/ Make my main partition and filesystem, copy my various distribution
> contents to this (Chroot to this partition to make sure it is hunkdory)
> 4/ Have a lilo2.conf with something like:
>
> boot=/dev/hdb
> disk=/dev/hdb
> bios=0x80
> map=/mnt/map
> linear
>
> default=linux
>
> image=/mnt/bzImage
> label=linux
> read-only
>
> 5/ Mount boot partition under /mnt/
> 6/ lilo -C lilo2.conf
> 7/ Remove CF, move to another machine as primary master and boot up
>
> linear addressing is required for CFs
> bios=0x80 tells lilo to write boot sector as if the disk was primary master
> so
> that the boot sector will work with the CF as primary master
>
> A good tip though is to try this with a normal IDE drive. This ensures you
> are
> confident you distribution works before blaming the Compact Flash.
>
> Hope this helps,
> Malcolm.
>
>
>
>
> --
> To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> with the command "unsubscribe linux-embedded" in the message body.
> For more information, see <http://waste.org/mail/linux-embedded>.
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - Free email you can access from anywhere!
http://mail.yahoo.com/
--
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with the command "unsubscribe linux-embedded" in the message body.
For more information, see <http://waste.org/mail/linux-embedded>.
