Sorry - silly typo. I meant that 1.33 would NOT let me boot from my CF card (didn't even see it as a 'disk') but 1.33c worked straight away.
So, maybe, 'c' added a few tweaks to the loader? One interesting thing though, my 8-gig card (was using a 4 before) boots fine from power up - but doesn't even get seen on a warm boot. Seems even 'c' has issues ;) -----Original Message----- From: Darryl Miles [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 09 March 2010 17:52 To: Andrew Thomas Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Soekris] Debian5/GRUB installation problems Andrew Thomas wrote: > 1.33c gave me the option to boot from a CF card - as it would with 1.33. I'm not sure I understand your response. The only storage I have installed is the CF card. I have it working providing I make the /boot partition fit on the first cylinder (the imaginary first cylinder when you convert to CHS geometry). So there is no doubt that plain 1.33 supports a CF card for booting. The only background reading I can find is that 1.33b/1.33c were produced in response to some issues/workaround with hardware production. Which might explain why no release notes since only those affected need to upgrade ? Nowhere has it been stated that any fixes/changes have been made in 1.33c that affect this particular problem. Infact I should ask, does anybody have a > 8Gb Compact Flash with GRUB working without the 1 cylinder restriction ? The 8Gb limit comes from the C/H/S geometry returned by comBIOS for my flash being 1946 cylinders, 255 heads, 63, sectors. This is larger than the 1024 cylinder limit. That limit for the C/H/S range of 0/0/1 to 1023/254/63 is 1024*255*63 sectors or 8225280 KiB or 8032.5 MiB or 7.8442 GiB or 8.422 Gb. So as flash maybe rated in Gb not GiB it needs to be larger than 8 Gb to be relevant. I do not have smaller CF cards to test and see what C/H/S geometry net5501 returns for say a 4Gb or 2Gb or 1Gb flash card. It is possible due to that geometry choice the particular bug I am being hit with does not show itself. Also does comBIOS 1.33 (and later versions) provide these BIOS interfaces : [INT 0x13 AH=0x41 BX=0x55aa] is used by GRUB for LBA mode check, it expects a return of [Carry flag reset, BX=0xaa55] on return to indicate LBA mode is supported (i.e. function AH=0x42 is supported for LBA mode). [INT 0x13 AH=0x42 various other registers used] is used by GRUB for LBA read sectors from disk into memory. Thanks, Darryl _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
