I am trying to boot DSL from a compact flash card stuck in a PCMCIA adapter in an IBM Thinkpad 560. This Thinkpad can easily boot from PCMCIA "disks"; I've booted MS-DOS from a CompactFlash this way, so that all works.

I've installed DSL to the CompactFlash using a variation of the USB Pendrive script.

When I boot the Thinkpad, I see syslinux loading, I get the pretty DSL boot screen, and the boot prompt. I type in various labels from the syslinux.cfg file such as

dsl
dsl fromhd=/dev/hdc1
lowram
lowram fromhd=/dev/hdc1

Each time it dies in the same way. Some of the messages are:

RAMDISK: Compressed imagee found at block 0
Freeing initrd memory: 249k freed
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem).
Welcome to DSL
...
Found USB devices; handled by usbcore.o
Found USB devices; handled by usb-storage.o

Then a whole series of these lines:
{CRE} Looking for DSL image in: /dev/sda
{CRE} Looking for DSL image in: /dev/sda1
...etc...
Kernel panic: unable to mount root fs on 03:02

DSL appears to be looking for the DSL image on a lot of /dev/sd* devices;
I need it to look in /dev/hdc1 (the only partition on the CompactFlash card).
I have seen in the messages that fly by that the hard drive is on hda and the Lexar CompactFlash is indeed on /dev/hdc

Any ideas on how to get it to load /knoppix/knoppix from hdc1?
(yes, they are both lower case.)

T very much IA,
- TSloth

I am getting the dame exact problem. Have you found a solution or does anyone have any input?

I have been distracted from this CompactFlash project.
The last thing I tried with DSL is using a DOS (MSDOS or FreeDOS) format (I know the laptop can boot MSDOS, and I hope to test FreeDOS soon) and then use loadlin. I sort of got that working but now am having trouble with the primitive display card in the old (IBM) laptop... the vesa driver doesn't run correctly, and the framebuffer is too slow.

I also started to try Puppy Linux. Puppy has done the most work at booting from a wide variety of devices, including USB, Zip, Windows partitions. Here too I plan to try FreeDOS.

- TSloth