PCMCIA Compact Flash Boot
 

Some background ( I'll try to keep it brief):
I have an old Compaq Elite LTE 486 DX50 laptop with 12MB of RAM and a 200 MB hard drive. I have Slackware 8.1 on the HD . I also have a Dallas Weather Station (windspeed, direction, temperature gadget) and I have adapted their Linux software so it runs fine(statically compiled). What I want to do is eliminate the 24 HR a day wear on the HD by setting up a mini floppy linux that will run the weather software from ramdisk; it doesn't need any thing else except support for the cua0 port. I tried the BYLD package that is supposed to make a one-disk floppy, but I can't get it to work. I've also got a PCMCIA to Compact Flash adapter and a 32 MB CF card, and I can R/W it fine from Slackware. I need to make a boot disk that will boot a minimum kernel, load a root filesystem, including the weather app., from the flash into a ramdisk, and run it. The problem is getting PCMCIA support in the kernel so the flash will be visible to load the root. I'd appreciate any help you could provide.
Ken Roberts

I solved the problem by switching to tomsrtbt after spending a lot of fruitless time trying to get BYLD to work. Tomsrtbt uses a similar process to alter the single boot floppy, but toms already had pcmcia support and I was able to add in ide_cs.o and alter the pcmcia scripts to get the whole thing working. I now have a system that runs with 32 MB of storage and without a hard drive.