USB booting :: booting from usb stick @ pcmcia usb hub

hello guys,
i have a big problem and do not know where to start:

the situation:
compaq armada 7700dmt laptop, 233mhz, 96mb ram, no internal usb, no harddrive, no floppy, dsl2.4.

it HAS a cd-rom drive, pcmcia usb 2.0 controller, pcmcia network drive, usb to pen install an an usb stick.

i want to boot from that usb stick plugged into the pcmcia usb controller.

but i do not know how to boot from that usb stick.
none of my trys with the start parameters of my live cd worked, because the usb stick cannot be found because the pcmcia drivers are not yet loaded.
(when i load the live cd for testing with the pcmica drivers the stick is correctly initialized as sda1, i even did a usb pen install on it)

so which way to go?

a) are there boot parameters for the live cd to start pcmcia and then boot from the usb stick?

b) building my own boot cd
i tinkered around with the bootfloppy.img and bootfloppy-usb.img, they seem to do exactly what i want EXPECT loading the pcmcia drivers first.
a big question mark is the pcmciafloppy.img.
(i do not find anything in the wiki, in the forum, nor in google about that file) it isnt bootable and i dont know where to put the files to take advance of it.

please help!

i'm getting mad.

can it be done? vs. is it impossible?

It is possible.

In fact, roberts has built a 2 disk pcmcia boot floppy to boot DSL from a pcmcia CDROM device.

It should be possible to build upon his work and load the USB controller driver module and also the USB mass storage driver module and then continue booting DSL.

Basically, you want to do a pcmcia bootup, but with a USB boot done at the end of the pcmcia driver load step.

ok i don't have a clue ...

where can i get this 2 disk pcmcia boot floppy you talk about?

maybe a little guide how to alter them?

thanks in advance.

The boot floppy image files are stored at the DSL download site. You can use Rawrite32 (Search google for a Rawrite32 download site) to create the boot floppies from MSWindows.

As for how to edit the minirt (that loads the drivers), see this post for more details:

http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....linuxrc

If may be beyond your comfort level to figure this out, but you might be able to do it.

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