Hi all,
Here is my situation, I have a harddrive on my machine where my FC2 is installed. My board has a CompactFlash Reader (/dev/hdc). I'm trying to install a small OS on the CompactFlash card, put a boot loader on it and then, remove the hard drive and let the CF be it.

I think I'm running into problems just creating the file system on the CF, here's what I did so far:

mkfs.ext2 /dev/hdc
fdisk /dev/hdc

Create a single partition(w/ bottable flag on), write and exit.

my device.map looks like this:
hd0 /dev/hdb
hd1 /dev/hdc


Then if I go to the GRUB command line and try to setup (hd1) or even if I try to mount /dev/hdc I get unknown fs type, did I miss a step? And if I get passed that, GRUB ends up filling up the whole drive w/ nothing so I get a 100% full when looking at df .

I'm doing something wrong (duh), I just need to know what.

Thanks and have a great day...

JF

I belive this is a BIOS issue. GRUB only sees the boot devices that BIOS passes to it. If your BIOS does not support booting from the CF reader then GRUB will not be able to boot from it. Possibly a BIOS upgrade would fix this.

Thanks for your reply, however, it doesn't seem to be a BIOS issue, the bios sees it the device just fine.

I've tried in 2 different ways, the first one was w/ grub-install like so:

grub-install /dev/hdc1

Then:

#grub
#root (hd1,0)
#setup (hd1,0)

There it tells me that everything seems to be fine, modified my grub.conf, copied my /boot directory on the card....shutdown the machine, take off the hard drive, reboot ...

nothing ...

I've also tried w/ lilo and the bios command but no worky either. When running lilo I get a File or Directory does not exist /dev/hdc.

I'm getting a little lost here.

Thanks,
JF

Minor point of clarification - does your BIOS list the CF as an option in the boot devices? If not, you won't be able to boot from it. In other words it's not so much whether the BIOS recognizes the device, but whether or not it supports that device as a boot option. (To use an analogy, very old PC's supported CD drives, but didn't always permit the system to boot from them.)

As you know the typical boot device options are the floppy, the CD, and the hard drive; depending on your mobo/BIOS you may also be able to boot from a USB device, possibly the CF, etc, but it would depend on your mobo. Good luck with it -- J.W.