Problem SD card in a IDE adapter
 

Hi,

I bought a SD card of 8Gb to boot an old server (IBM Netfinity 1000, PIII), instead of the scsi 10000rpm disk, in order to have a less noisy computer and to save on electrical bills.

When inserted in the card reader of my notebook, the Slack64 13.37 system sees it as /dev/mmcblk0
I created an ext2 partition, made it bootable and installed the operating system: other slack 32bits 13.37.

When I insert the sd card in the ide adapter of the old server, the adapter and disk seem to be detected, but fdisk reports that partition table is not valid.
Tried to follow some instructions as to set nr of heads and sectors to 32 for the card. In the notebook, the card keeps the format and I can copy files into the ext2 partition.

But when I return it to the server the problem with the partition table arises again. And fdisk doesn't see the card anymore with 32 heads and sectors.
I also tried the sd card and adapter in a much newer computer, with ubuntu 10.04, and the problem persists.

I can think of two possible causes: problem with the sd to ide adapter or bios problems/configuration.

For the record: I tried the same thing with another sd card, formatted from factory with fat filesystem but the problem is similar.

Do you have any ideas on this?

I doubt you'd save much energy since the rest is so bad at efficiency. A small atom or K amd would beat this server for most things if not all.

I'd replace the ide to cf adapter. I'd also load the OS on the system instead of moving it.