Can't mount CF card on Primary IDE Master

AllenKll · 03-02-2012, 08:30 AM

Hello,
I am working on a Vortex86DX PC104 board that has a built on CF card reader.

I built a CF card using XLinux on a windows machine, and the system boots fine.

After login, however, I am unable to mount /dev/hda1 I get the error: "no such device or address"

I verified that /dev/hda1 does exist. I'm not really sure how to continue debugging from here. I have also tried deleting and readding /dev/hda1 using mknod, with no success.

I have looked at dmesg, and there is no mention of hda or sda devices.

Xlinux uses busy box. And I do not have udev. I have booted the system from a CD rom using DSL and was able to mount the CF card without issue, so I do not think this is a hardware problem.

Please, I could really use some direction on this.

thanks,
-Allen

jefro · 03-02-2012, 05:16 PM

On a 2.6 kernel shouldn't the drive be a /dev/sda1?

If you can log on, what are you logging into exactly?

AllenKll · 03-03-2012, 09:33 AM

Thanks for your reply.

Quote:

On a 2.6 kernel shouldn't the drive be a /dev/sda1?

You may be right, I've tried that also with no success.

Quote:

If you can log on, what are logging into exactly?

I am logging into a Busybox prompt running in memory.

my mount looks like this:

Code:

rootfs on / type rootfs (rw)
/dev/root on / type ext2 (rw,errors=continue)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
tmpfs on /tmp type tmpfs (rw)
tmpfs on /var type tmpfs (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,mode=600)
sys on /sys type sysfs (rw)

My Kernel command line indicates: root=/dev/ram0

Some more information for those trying to help:
I see in dmesg these interesting lines:

Code:

Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver
ide_generic: please use "probe_mask=0x3f" module parameter for probing all legacy ISA IDE ports
ide-gd driver 1.18
Driver 'sd' needs updating - please use bus_type methods

Are they telling me what I need? if so can someone please explain it?
I don't know how to use the prob_mask module parameter. Should this be entered at the kernel command line? or is there a config file that this should go in? Is it just a red herring?

thanks,
-Allen

floppy_stuttgart · 03-03-2012, 10:21 AM

Are shunts on the IDE adapter for your CF card? (for setting primary/secondary).
This is what I made (from remembering) when I attached my CF card to my PC via IDE and moved it from primary/secondary: after a certain move, it did not run anymore and I had to move the IDE shunts. (Or perhaps moved back the IDE+CF to the place where it was recognized).

AllenKll · 03-03-2012, 10:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by floppy_stuttgart

Are shunts on the IDE adapter for your CF card? (for setting primary/secondary).

Floppy,
There are no shunts (jumpers). Also there is no IDE adapter. The CF card has a slot on the board, and it is set (via bios) to Primary, Master. The BIOS recognizes the CF card, and boots off of it. I just can't get it to mount after linux has booted.

-Allen

jefro · 03-03-2012, 12:15 PM

I am still confused. Does this thing have an embedded OS besides the cf?

There are a few thousand configurations of this type of board. Some have an embedded flash onboard that you may be booting too. Where did you get this from?

AllenKll · 03-03-2012, 12:30 PM

Quote:

Does this thing have an embedded OS besides the cf?

No there is no embedded os.
This is the VDX-104 from Tri-M.

It is definitely booting from the CF card.

floppy_stuttgart · 03-04-2012, 01:37 PM

I dont fully understand: you have XLinux on a CF card, it boots from there (extlinux? grub?) but dont recognize the CF card when booted?
Please post the results of
- your command line of grub/extlinux of your XLinux
- dmesg
- lsusb
- lspci
- lshw
Can you perhaps install TinyCoreLinux to that CF? (modern variant of damnsmalllinux). Perhaps a distro issue not seeing fully the hardware.

theNbomr · 03-04-2012, 05:23 PM

If the OS boots, but doesn't recognize the CF drive, it seems likely that the bootloader (unspecified) has some kind of built-in driver for the hardware, but the kernel which it loads does not. There may or may not be a loadable driver for the hardware associated with your Xlinux kernel.
Since you have a working system that does see the CF device, why don't you run that OS, and see if you can tell what driver is loaded (or, it might also be a built-in). Run dmesg, and see if you can tell what driver knows about the CF hardware. The see if you can load that driver on your XLinux OS.

--- rod.

AllenKll · 03-05-2012, 01:46 PM

@floppy:
The answer to you question is yes. It boots from the CF card, but doesn't recognize it after boot. Using loadlin.
The dmesg file would take a while to type out, I'll pass on posting that, but if you want to see a speceific entry I can look for it. lsusb, lshw, and lspci do not exist on the system.

@theNbomr:
Gave that a try with TinyCore. I saw a number of DMA issues, but it still accessed fine.

All:
I don't know what the issue is/was, but I'm dropping it.

The only reason I was using Xlinux was that it was the only distro that had support for the Ethernet chip that the board has. After some digging I found that support for the chip is in the current Linux kernel, and I need a distro with a recent kernel. Looking at TinyCore 4.4RC2, it boots the system and recognizes the Ethernet (uses kernel 3.0.21). It did however show errors with lib ata using DMA.

Long story short. I disabled libata.dma=0 on the Linux command line, and saw no errors accessing the CF card. Even though I did not see these errors on the XLinux system, I tried the the same on X-Linux but it did not fix the issue.

All in all TinyCore does everything I need, and am moving forward with that.

Thank you all for your help,

-Allen