Hello

I was running successfully IPCop on an old Compaq Presario 5471 computer, until the hard disk crashed. I tried to replace the HD by a compact flash card connected with an IDE-CF adapter, but the BIOS (version 686C2) of Compaq cannot detect that card at boot time.

I am looking for a workaround for defining the geometry of the card manually, but the Compaq setup utility doesn't allow it. I am looking for a way to tweak the BIOS.

Any help would be very appreciated.

Hi -

IDE devices are cheap, and Flash drives are *not* good for a primary (lots of writes) filesystem.

Suggestion: why not just take the path of least resistance and find a usable IDE drive?

Alternatively, perhaps the BIOS might let you boot off of USB (just get a distro like Knoppix, Puppy or DSL)?

Is the adapter a pcmcia for CF card. Or is it internal IDE to CF. Because internal (ide ribbon cable) IDE to CF works on a 8gig microdrive out of a Ipod on one of my Laptop caddies. Solid state CF should be no different.

If PCMCIA adapter. That is a harder nut to crack as far as I know. Requires grub install to floppy and chainloading to linux already installed on CF card (catch-22).

Maybe a Plop floppy would work, but I am not sure as I never tried pcmcia boot with my plop floppy. Just pendrive usb boot.

A site you may find useful is http://kmandla.wordpress.com/

The distro is IPCop and is foreseen for working with a CF card. All the write operation happen in ramdisk, and are saved on the CF card a few times each day. I tried the CF card because I couldn't find small/cheap IDE drives. The BIOS doesn't support USB booting either.

It is an internal IDE-CF adapter, not PMCIA.

Ok. I am understanding your problem better now. When I did what you did but I used a micro drive instead of cf card. I had to go into my bios and use the autodetect feature for drives in my bios for bios to see it. I realize now that as far as your bios is concerned. There is no drive in the computer.

Tough nut to crack there. You can download the manual in pdf format and read if there is a way to adjust the bios I guess. Instructions for how to recognize a drive/use the bios. may be in there maybe.

If Bios won't recognize the cf card in the adapter. Then you are stuck.

Edit:I have also bypassed that limitation by making a Plop Boot Floppy and booted up AntiX 11 on a bios with no capability to boot usb. It was on a IBM a22m Laptop.

http://forum.plop.at/index.php?topic=121.0

http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html

I used the antiX2usbpy in the antiX control center to make a persistent live usb pendrive and the floppy to bypass bios to boot the Linux on USB.

Old machine - modern drives too big?
I think I still have a 1.4 Gig 2.5" internal drive formatted boot, swap, & root which might stand up to a console for you, if it gets you out of something. I'm in Ireland. I totally forget what's installed, (Mandrake?)but it's 10+ years old. It needs LBA

That said, if we're dealing with old stuff, there was a type 47 disk in most bios of the time where you specified your own chs The systems were
< 1023cyl <16heads (sectors were always maxed out) max size 512 Mb without lba

< 1023cyl <255heads (sectors were always maxed out) max size 2Gig with lba

Heads were always 2, and the system was lied to as policy. Some things never change

The ide to cf works but you either have some setup wrong or too large of a drive or a NON-bootable adapter. The adapter has to say it is bootable.

It would show up in bios and you may have to swag some settings if you can't get exact.

@jefro: The BIOS of Compaq (version 686C2 which is of the year 2000) offers no possibility to define manually the disk type/geometry: the disk is detected or it is not.

@rokytnji: I have a (still working) floppy drive in my Compaq Presario. Do you know if booting from plop will make it possible to chainboot from the IDE primary drive if this latter is not detected by the BIOS?

On the floppy, the short answer to your question is yes, with a large BUT.
If you boot with root=/dev/sda1 you will probably do it. What you will not do easily is fit a full 2.6 kernel onto a single floppy. That's the BUT.

A way forward might be to use the bios trick that allows the drive to be drive A: and drive B: in Dos-speak. I would start this way with your kernel
make allnoconfig
make menuconfig
Use bz2 compression for the kernel and investigate what namespaces & auditing you need. You may need to go back in time kernel wise, but I would avoid 2.4 if at all possible.

@business_kid: I do not want to fit the kernel on the floppy, I just want the floppy to boot plop, and then to ask plop to boot the kernel from the CF card that the BIOS failed to detect. So the kernel will be on CF card. I guess it must be possible since you can ask plop to boot from a CD-IDE.

It's a maybe. Try it.
/my guess
grub sits up, with limited abilities to do anything. If the system doesn't know it has a disk, how is grub going to? My guess is, I suppose, that the system asks "what kind of disk is out there? and gets no answer.
/end guess
As I understand it, when the kernel has booted, with drivers loaded, it can bypass the bios. But if asking the disc "What's out there?" returns the answer "Nothing!" no software will like it.You would do better with a live cd. You may also be cheered by the low prices at the bottom end of pc sales.

Another option might be to use the floppy with some exotic boot parameters to tell it to never mind what the bios says and just read the disk anyhow. Personally, I feel you're going down in flames, but that's only my opinion.

Not to be confused...

If you are going to try Plop, it is the Plop Boot Manager that you should try, not Plop Linux. A floppy of Plop Boot Manager doesn't boot Plop, it tries to boot whatever operating system it finds on the devices it has access to. Note that there is a Plop forum for help.

Does your old system have the latest BIOS available?

http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html