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Y! centarus2000

Very doable.

Does the computer's BIOS (and/or DOS) think this flashcard is a hard drive or a floppy? (if floppy, it makes clear your original desire to partition it). If it is a floppy, then you *can* get Jailbait Linux (which looks interesting, I'll have to try it out) on a DOS formatted drive using a technique called a "loopback filesystem" which imbeds the entire native Linux file system in a single DOS file (You can also use DMSDOS, but I think this is a much worse kludge). Otherwise, if we can partition this thing, we can leave out this step.

Next we need to move the actual kernel file and any initrd file (I'll have to check out Jailbait to see if it uses one, I'm also assuming the whole filesystem isn't a ramdisk. It might be) to the DOS "area" of the disk. Obtain "loadlin.exe" and put it into your DOS autoexec.bat file that does half of your boot menu selections. Loadlin, with the proper parameters will boot your Linux from DOS.

Anyway, let me know what we need to do, and I can help you move your Jailbait linux to a loopback file system file if you need to. I can also help with the DOS boot menu thing.

Also, what OS is on the hard drive and do you have a DOS program that can boot over to it? If not, we might need to implore some extra Linux trickery to help out. Can we use space and/or the OS on the hard drive temporarly to help set this whole thing up? Do you really have a need/use/desire for DOS in this flashcard anyway?

PS: I was worried that if you really were in Antarctica, it would explain why you are using flash cards: Hard drive bearings freezing up!

Bios thinks it's a floppy. I can use as much space as needed on my hard drive to help accomplish all this. I would need help making jailbait into a loopback filesystem. Then, what about booting to the hard drive? Interstingly enough, I might also want to, once this is done, do the same thing to a cd, it might be interesting to have a bootable cd with the same setup. Accomplish one, the other is already done for you.

Okay, I checked out Jailbait Linux.

If you are a with Linux, you are going to find this thing very hard to deal with. It seems to be very specific to the Authors hardware: IOpener Net Computer. If this is what you have, then great. Otherwise expect a steep learning curve adapting this thing to your hardware.

It looks like you can copy the whole image to the raw front of your flashcard as a disk image (not a file in a file system), and boot on it. I did it to a zip disk and it sort of worked. Linux needs to see the flash card as the second IDE drive in the system but with the system BIOS swapping it over to the first. If you can't simulate this, you'll have to get into the file system on it and change some things somehow. I did. I know you said that the BIOS/DOS thinks this thing is a floppy drive. Once the Linux kernel gets loaded it will probably treat it as a hard drive, but there are still some unknowns. Of course in my case I had it on a Zip disk instead of a Flash Card, so I had to recompile a kernel that knew how to work with one. You won't have this problem, but there is a lot of other things you might have to do. The only choice for the X server is XFree86-version 3.x's SVGA server. This server covers a large assortment of video cards. It didn't cover mine, maybe it will cover yours. Expect other hardware support problems too: Sound, Network cards, Modems, etc. Also because much of the system uses the CRAMFS file system, you can't just copy file changes into most of it, you have to rebuild the whole file system image.

This looks like this is an abandoned project anyway. I don't think there has been any work on it for over 2 years. It appears to be built from an older version of Mandrake and uses a 2.4.0-test-1 kernel! (this is a pretty scary kernel, but hopefully it will work well enough). If you are really looking for a challenge, you could take this project, spend a bunch of time on it and make it work real nice for you. I think I would start over from scratch.

If this is your first attempt at Linux, my suggestion is to see if you can come up with at least a few hundred megs of free disk space on the hard drive of that computer and install something closer to a "proper" Linux distribution. You have lots of options on how to do this. Then you can use it to learn and build your little Flash Card version. I don't really know how you would be able to modify Jailbait enough to get it to boot on most machines unless you have an installed version of Linux to work on it with.

Sorry about potential bad news, I just wanted to make sure you are prepared for what you are in for. There are a bunch of other mini Linux distributions out there that I am a lot more impressed with, but they also would need to be modified to work for you.

Ok dokey. Jailbait's out. I see your point. I was looking at it cause I had used it on my IA-1. However, I would still like to at least make dos, and have it boot to either the dos, or the hard drive, what linux trickery could accomplish this? And what other distros would be ideal to run this way, similar to the loopback fs idea? I have about......50 megs I can use for the linux.

Oh! Now that you've *finally* told me what you have, take a look at these pages:

http://iahack.tripod.com/

http://thinker.falcons2000.com/ia1/

In otherwords, you really *can* get jailbait running on this thing.

Now, it takes a 16 meg memory card. If yours is bigger than that, once you get Jailbait Linux running on it, you should be able to do a few tricks with Linux's "fdisk" to get the partition table to show its correct size, then create a new partition and put DOS on it. I would also make an additional Linux type partition because Jailbait's is pretty full. Then All you have to do is configure the Linux boot loader (lilo) to boot into Linux (already would), DOS (easy), or the hard drive (should also be easy, except I didn't know these things had hard drives, is this some sort of add-on?).

It still looks like you need another computer with a card reader to build up this system however. (I'm not surprised)

Anyway, it looks like you are in business after all. I would get as far as you can and then see if you can contact some of these people that have already done it.

My statement about this being a pretty rough version of Linux still stands however. Hopefully you have another computer that you can put a full Linux distribution on, it will really help you learn how to deal with Jailbait.

LOL

My 2cp worth, maybe it won't help you but maybe it will.

Once in DOS you can use loadlin to fire up linux, I've even used it for some really esotric linux boots like using the DOS NDIS network client to connect to a windows share on another machine and run loadlin from off the windows share (or partition magic or ghost or whatever.) Since you aren't being this complicated, if you have DOS booting on your flash card loadlin may be an easy way to go.

Yes, on Loadlin: Once the kernel and optional initial ramdisk gets loaded, a properly configured Linux seems to be able to find it's root file system even in very strange places. Dukeleto can do it this way, and probably should as a backup method of getting into Jailbait, but the pages I've found for him give specific instructions on how to do it making the sytem boot directly into lilo. Lilo of course can be made to produce a boot menu to allow user choices of other operating systems on other drives. Lilo is powerful but has has steep learning curve. I feel it is well worth learning though.

Back to the IA-1 thing, It looks like it has a bit of a cult following, here is a little forum associated to it:

http://tinyurl.com/4wkm

It seems that there is are "hacked" versions of Jailbait floating around that is designed for this thing. Unfortunatly most of the links to it I've found don't work. I did find this one that is a *very* hacked version, the Author says there is very little jailbait left in it: http://oklegal.onenet.net/ipaq/ipaq-1a.html

Search through all the pages of that forum listed above or do Google searches on "ipaq ia-1 jailbait" and see if you can find some peoples' pre-made images that might be nicely set up.

People also seem to be running Midori Linux on them, which is also a little tough to find.

I guess these things seem to sell for about $60 on ebay. I would consider buying one, get a big flash card for it and plug a wireless network card into it, but I have too many computers laying around as it is. I even have a faster processor laying around that I could put in it assuming I can figure out how to get the power supply not to choke on it.

Excellent help you guys. Incredible. I want to do it this way....
Load dos
Bootmenu
Exit the menu for the dos
Use loadln for linux
Still, want to be able to boot to hard drive as default, HOW?
Hard drive is an add-on btw.

Anybody here up on I-Openers?

If you can get to the hard drive from DOS without loading any special drivers (hence BIOS support for the drive), then linux's Lilo can be configured to boot to the hard drive, and DOS on the CF card when selected to from a friendly boot screen that comes up instantly just when the computer starts to boot. However you have to get Linux installed before you can setup Lilo (or it's competitor "grub"). Otherwise you'll either have have to find another boot manager, (like "Partition Magic", a popular commercial one) that can do it, or see if you can find a simple DOS program that will boot into another drive, one is bound to exist somewhere.

If you just install one of those preconfigured Linux disk images to the flash card as a "disk image", you'll get the boot selector pre-installed as part of the disk image. You'll just have to do is configure it to boot your other OS's on whatever drives that the BIOS of the computer knows about. The only wild part is that if you copy one of these 16mb disk images to a larger CF card, which I'm assuming you have, otherwise you have no room for DOS anyway, the newly installed MBR will still think it's only a 16mb disk. This is where I think you can use Linux's "FDISK" to fix that (use the "advanced mode and adjust the total number of cylinders?) and then use it to create your MSDOS partition. Then once copy your DOS back on the thing, you're done. You have a triple booting system.

If you try to have DOS first, then install any of those Linux "disk images", you'll have to take the Linux partitions out of the disk image and copy them to your own partitions. I don't know how to do this in other OS's besides Linux, so I can't help you, but here is what you'll have to do:

1) Extract all the partitions out of the disk image into separate partition images, Jailbait has 1 primary and 4 logicals on an extended partition.

2) Extract the Linux Kernel from the /boot directory of the first primary partition

3) Create new empty partitions to hold the partitions extracted above.

4) Copy the partition images to the empty partitions.

5) Make what ever changes in the /etc/fstab and the /etc/rcS/ramdisk.s file to fix any changes you've made in the partition layout. For example: Jailbait wants root on 1, /bin on 5, /lib on 6, /sbin on 7 and /usr on 8. If you put them in any other places, you'll have to edit these files. The "hacked up" disk image had things down to just 2 partitions. Partitions 5,6,7,8 are all "CRAMFS" read-only compressed file systems.

6) Then copy your kernel to somewhere in your DOS file system execute "loadlin <somewhere>\vmlinuz root=/dev/hda?" and hope I haven't forgotten anything.

7) You have to either configure a boot loader/selector or find a DOS program to boot you on the hard drive.

If it sounds like I'm trying to convince you to put Linux and it's boot loader on the CF card first then adjust it to add DOS, you're right. Unless I'm missing something (which is entirely possible), I think it will be a lot easier this way.

Um just wow. I've not really a way to do that for now. The card is a 256 meg card....
Actually it seems to only be 245.
I've fried 3 of them so far messing with partition tables and such....not really looking to do it again. Anybody able to do this, and make an image of it that I can download?

*sigh*

You probably didn't really *fry* them. You probably just corrupted their MBRs. It would be a good leaning experience to learn how to "repair" them. Linux's "fdisk" might do it. You can download something like the latest beta of LNX-BBC (45 meg ISO image) to work on it with if needed. Do you have a *real* computer that you can use to prepare these CF cards with? Do a little research on how these CF card drives really work.

You might do some asking around on that forum that I posted you about. Some of those people seem to really know something about this stuff.

Actually with that kind of space, you could probably run some bigger (and a lot nicer) Linux distro's on it anyway. There are several that share the same file system with your DOS (either DMS-DOS types or "Loopback" types). You might have to replace the kernel in them with one that will recognize the CF card however. Some good examples are that LNX-BBC, and Vector-Linux (Peanut Linux used to fit, but I seems to have gotten "bloat-itis" lately). There are probably much more that I don't know about. You could even do a ground up custom/minimum install of Debian through the web, which is probably your best bet anyway.

You have a steep learning curve ahead of you but the education will be well worth it.

Now....one more question....
I want to create a bootable cd, same EXACT structure. Loads, allows you to boot to hard disk, linux, or DOS. Ideas? I can create the bootable cd, that I've got down pat. I could use the cf card once I'm done with it to be the bootable drive that it copies. Still...would it work?