Hi,

I'm having a strange problem getting debian etch to boot off of a cf card installed in a pcmcia adapter. The laptop is a thinkpad 560e and debian runs fine off of the hard drive but gets stuck during the boot on the pcmcia/cf card. I believe that it is because when it starts detecting pcmcia devices, there is some conflict in that it is already accessing the drive which is then is newly detected. Is there some way to disable detection of one of the pcmcia slots?

Thanks!

kozimodo

Hi

I'm expressing my ignorance here and I wonder if you could enlighten me.

I'm puzzled because I thought that it wasn't possible to boot directly from a PCMCIA device because it is not possible for the laptop to converse with the PCMCIA adapter until it has loaded drivers into memory to support communication with the PCMCIA adapter.
ie. The laptop would have to boot from another device, load an OS (or bootstrap loader program) and then load the necessary PCMCIA driver in order to allow the data on the PCMCIA device to be accessed.

really interested to know if the IBM Thinkpad 560e can directly boot from a PCMCIA storage device.

Interested to hear your advice

Chris

NB. I've got TP600, and TP600e 's collecting dust - hence my curiosity

Hi

I've just been having a Google about regarding the TP series and booting off a PCMCIA device.
This site might be of interest to you: www.thinkwiki.org

According to this site (see "Booting from a PCMCIA device"), it is possible to boot a TP off a PCMCIA device provided that the device appears to the TP as a normal hard disk drive, and the first block on the device is configured to make the device bootable.

They site an example wherein they copy a bootable image for a linux OS onto the media in the PCMCIA device using the dd command; update the TP's device boot order using the EZ Setup utility; then restart the TP.

Interesting.

Can I suggest that you follow their example as a trial using Ubuntu ? It will allow you to establish that the process in practice.

Hope that assists

Chris

Hi

Just another thought/question

Have you been able to boot another PC successfully using the CF card and PCMCIA adapter in it's current state ? I'm wondering if the problem is realated to the image on the CF card or the TP hardware itself.

Chris

It starts the boot just fine with no intervention from linux. It is only when it detects pcmcia hardware that it starts throwing errors. So no, I don't think it is the image. I can't easily install ubuntu because my TP only has a floppy.

If your TPs have a bios option that allows them to boot from pcmcia, there are all kinds of fun things you could do with them. I'm planning to turn mine into a digital picture frame.

kozimodo

Hmmm

Here's an idea...
If you've got access to a desktop PC with a media card reader, run a copy of a Live linux CD (Knoppix, etc) start up a terminal shell, and copy the Ubuntu install image to the CF card using the dd command (as described in the article referred to). Then dismount the card, install it in the PCMCIA adapter, and try booting that on the TP.

You could check the integrity of the CF card by comparing the result of the write with the source image - to rule out problems with the CF card hardware.

A request...

Could you post some of the error message details that you see?
Say the first 10 lines if possible.
(Suggestion: you could take a snapshot of the screen (on pause) with a digital camera, and refer to that when typing up the messages).
What size CF card are you using ?
What brand and model of PCMCIA adapter are you using ?

Regards

Chris

Thanks, I'll give that a try -- I can do that from the existing hard drive install.

As far as the errors go:
pd6729: Cirrus PD6729 PCI to PCMCIA Bridge at 0x3e0 polling on irq 0
pd6729: ISA irqs = 3,4,5,7,9,10,11 status changes.
hdc: status timeout: status=0xff { Busy }
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
hdc: drive not ready for command
pccard: PCMCIA card insrted into slot 0
pccard: PCMCIA card inserted into slot 1
ide1: reset timed-out, status=0xff
hdc: status timeout: status=0xff { Busy }
ide: failed opcode was: unknown

After that, it spews a bunch of other errors relating to not being able to access various sectors of hdc and 'cannot execute "/sbin/getty"' before finally freezing with:

INIT: no more processes left in this runlevel

Cheers,
Ted

I did manage to install hardy onto the CF card using debootstrap but I get exactly the same problem. The boot is fine up until it starts checking for pcmcia devices at which point it can no longer access the CF card.

Paw though this to start. http://tldp.org/HOWTO/PCMCIA-HOWTO-5.html

There used to be a lot of IBM info for pcmcia boot that related to dos but as I recall it should help here.

Also some cf disks are not true hard drive pin outs.

Might have to do like a zipslack deal on fat. Boot to dos and then loadlin or such.

Wonder if you could get grub to see the device?

Also look at bios. Seems to me there was a irq that made all the difference. Change to 9 or 10 I forget.



From thinkwiki. "
Booting from a PCMCIA device

Many ThinkPads, even as old as some original Pentium models, can boot from a PCMCIA slot. The device must appear as a normal hard drive for that to work, and it must have boot code on the first block of the device. PCMCIA hard drives and some PCMCIA card readers (compact flash, SD, memory stick, etc.) will work for this purpose.

If your distribution offers an installation image, just copy it to the device and boot from it. Here's a sample that works with Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). Insert the card and reader into a laptop running Linux. If the device mounts automatically, unmount it. Run these commands:
wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dis...ot/boot.img.gz
gunzip boot.img.gz
sudo dd if=boot.img of=/dev/sdb (careful!)

Be very careful when typing that last line. A typo could erase your hard drive. This image installs over a network, but there are other larger images that install the entire system directly.

Put the card reader and any other needed cards (such as a network card). Get into EZSetup and change the boot order to PCMCIA then HDD-1. Reboot and the installation should start."