running on a drive that bios can not see
 

I am building a configuration on a mini-itx board (a VIA EPIA MII-10000) and want
to run off of a compact flash card slot that linux has no problem seeing as /dev/hde1,
but bios can not see and thus can not boot from. I'm using RH 9 at the moment
with a 2.4.20-8 kernel (I'd just as soon stick with RH9 but could certainly upgrade
to a newer kernel if needed (and maybe my wireless troubles will need that anyway)).

My plan is to use a passive IDE / CF adapter to put a smaller cheaper (16MB 8x) CF
card as an IDE disk that bios does detect, and then have it bring up an environment
that is (mostly or entierly?) on a 2G 80x CF card in the CF slot (i.e so I can upgrade
it easily as the CF card in the IDE adapter will not be accessible without opening
the case).

So what I would like (and I could swear I have seen before but can not find now) is
some guide lines as to how to do this. It seems like there are a number of choices
like putting an entire bootable environment (like on a floppy) on the small card and
then just mounting the larger one, or putting just lilo on the small card and referencing
the larger one for the actual system, or...

Suggestions, pointers to where this has been discussed previously etc, all most welcome.
thanks in advance from me and my soon to be "alive" robot!
-jrg

if your bios can't see it most likly your not going to be able to boot from it


like i can boot linux right off of my usb jump drive because my bios detects it and allows me to do so
but when i put it in a different computer the bios cant detect it there for i can't boot

and thats only cuz the bios doens't support it not nessaraly cuz its an older computer/motherboard

Right, maybe I wasn't clear about this. I have to "drives", actually both
CF cards

a 16MB card pretending its an IDE drive that thus CAN be seen by BIOS
and
a 2G faster card that can not be seen by bios, but can be acessed with no problem by the kernel, once it running.

So boot (something, full kernel or..) off of the small card but then run off the bigger one.

Make a bootdisk with lilo or something, and tell lilo to boot into that drive.