Malcom -
Thanks for your information. It ended up taking about
2 days for me to get this to work. The archive of
this group provided some really good insight, but I
wasn't sure exactly why I was doing some of the things
that I did to get it to work. Thanks for your notes,
it definately helps to fill in some of the gaps.
I'm using a SanDisk CF, and I have had no problems with
it. The only errors that I get are when I initially
boot or mount after booting from a hard disk. They
look like:
dhb: drive_cmd: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hdb: drive_cmd: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
I think that they can be attributed to the fact that
Linux is attempting to slide the metal part of a floppy
open, and it is not able to. It works fine otherwise.
Paul
-----Original Message-----
From: Malcolm Dodds [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Monday, September 11, 2000 10:07 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Booting from compact flash?
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.
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