What's with my boot floppies?
 

I use the images on my CD to make about every kind of floppy Mandrake gives you as of Mandrake 9. However, on the floppies that has PCMCIA card, my laptop's Cirrus CL-PD672x PCMCIA root controller crashes the PCMCIA driver. It terminates with an error level of 9 every time. Because of this, I cannot access a PCMCIA network card to do a network install. ...that and my Parallel port CD I got to try to install is a bum...:mad: How do I get a network boot floppy to use my PCMCIA slots to do an install? Do I need to go to Slackware or something?

Nobody got a clue? :scratch:

how are you copying over the boot disks?

what is the output from the errors?

send back more info.

Huh, looking at the konsole logs, it has a PCMCIA: Probing PCMCIA Bus... Not Found statement. On my main screen, it detects my root PCMCIA device (which I listed above) then terminates abnormally with an error level of 9. Beyond that, I see nothing. I'm gonna try to see if I can get this to some sort of log file or something. How would I go about doing that on a boot floppy? Usually, after I try the boot disk initially, I use dd if=image.img of=/dev/fd0 and I sometimes fdformat the disks. Nothing seems to help. What's the best amount to copy at a time? I tried 512 bytes which made no diference. By the way, what I put here as image.img is my actual image file name. That is every image I have which come on the Mandrake 9 CD, and the Mandrake 7.2 CD as well. I heard that flashing the cmos would help, but in this case it didn't. Did fix an issue where it would sometimes not respond after being taken out of suspend, but before I could suspend it again and pull it back out and it would usually work.

what are you in now? the dd should work, don't know about the pcmia.img that your trying to dump though. the images should be the proper size to fit on a floppy. you might have to format it first though. for that fdformat /dev/fd0H1440, then do the dd on the cd images for the pcmia.

i dont' know about the level 9 error that your recieving so i can't help out there.

I'm getting the error on ALL floppies that support pcmcia, including pcmcia.img, network.img, and all.img. Where's the code for the floppies? Maybe we can look in the source code and figure out what the error level of 9 actually means. Whoever coded the PCMCIA driver had to have put in a RETURN 9 value at the end of the subroutine code that I'm hitting. If we can figure out what that routine is, we may have a better clue to what's happening.

Think I should try Slackware or something?:scratch:

i was just reading the debian reference manual and it said something about removing the cardmgr stuff and just using the kernel support.
section 7.2.1
I don't really know much more than that but maybe it will help.

I saw it said about needing something in a ISA ran PCMCIA slot. I think that's like mine. Think my problem could be that Mandrake may not have put that line in on their boot floppies?:scratch: ...an interesting point.:jawa:

well from what i understand about laptops(which is very little and sketchy) is that the isa-pnp stuff is about isa based cards. old 16-bit cards. if your card is 32-bit then it isn't ISA i think. what card do you have? and how old is the laptop? i installed debian on a sony laptop and the base installation went fine but then when i installed the bulk of the system it started arfing all over the place. i figured out that it was something with the pcmcia card but i didn't have time to figure it out. it was before i read that part in the manual. anyhow as far as mandrake i don't what startup scripts it uses and such, but i hear that its pretty close to redhat. sounds like a project.:) check out http://www.linux-laptop.net if you haven't already. good luck!

My laptop isn't listed on there. It's a rare breed I guess. As far as the laptop, it's a Compaq Armada 1120, with 8MB Ram and a plain Pentium 100 and a 800MB (or so) hard disk. The ISA-based PCMCIA, which is a Cirrus CL-PD672x causes Mandrake to abnormally exit with a error level of 9. Because of this, I cannot access a Netgear FA411 16 bit PCMCIA LAN card. However, under Tomsrtbt Linux, PCMCIA works, but it don't support the card. I do have drivers for it to compile in, but I'm not sure how to compile them in yet. I'm still a rookie.

No Ideas?

well i would go over to the slackware sight and give they're boot floppies a try. there is a seperate pcmcia supplement disk you use along with the root and boot disks. i have an old 486 laptop with a isa based card and slackware handled it just fine. other than that i'm pretty dumb about laptops. good luck.

I haven't found the boot floppies yet though. :(

goto www.slackware.com and click on get slack and pick on of the mirrors. i don't know where the boot disks are located but the should be in directories like bootdisk.144 or something like that. download bare.i as a bootdisk, color.gz as a rootdisk, and pcmcia.dsk for the pcmcia driver. you shouldn't need the network disk. make the files into floppies. (it tells you on the slackware sight). boot with the boot disk, insert the root disk when asked and then after you login as root(i don't think it even prompts you for a password... but if it does just press enter). then insert the pcmcia disk and type pcmcia and press enter. a script should run and it should hopefully detect and install your pcmcia card. to test it out type and then try to ping another computer on your network. . good luck.

Their mirrors are down, and I told them about it.:cry: