HD Install :: frugal on compact flash

Hi all,

I'm running a P4/1G w/ CDROM on IDE0 Master and an in-built compact flash reader as IDE1 Master (4GB Transcend 120x). The CDROM is just for install and will ultimately not be in the box. The CF card always comes up as hdc (I have to specify 'nopcmcia').

Using DSL v3.3 with 'Frugal on CF' install script (option 5), I get to the part "Setting up lilo" fine, then it spits out a whole heap of errors as follows:

Code Sample

ide-scsi: hda: unsupported command in request queue (0)
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:00 (hda), sector #

Where #=0,2,4,6 (same error 4 times) and the whole sequence repeats 6 times (I think) for a total of 24 nearly identical errors - just the sector numbers change. At the bottom it says "Added DSL *", then in green "Installation complete."

When I reboot from CF card, I get a blinking underscore and nothing else.

So it appears it's having issues writing Lilo to the CF card. I mount on another Linux box via CF-USB adapter and verify that boot, KNOPPIX, and Lost+Found exist on the card as I suspect they should. And 'df-h' shows 50MB of my 200MB partition is used.

To prep the card I overwrote the first 512 bytes using dd ('cause I had GRUB on there before) and then cfdisk to create a bootable 200MB Linux partition. I used the format in the frugal script to make it ext2. And I rebooted the system in between the cfdisk and the frugal install script. I chose all of the 'conservative' options in the install script - no other partitions and default Xvesa.

Any suggestions please?

Seems everything got there exept lilo. Just boot DSL cd and install lilo manually (no idea how to do that, I use grub)... If you can't get lilo working, try grub... (note: for grub it will be (hd0,0) since it's the first hard disk thingy)

A similar thing happened to me on an scsi hd frugal install and I (finally) managed to manually set up a lilo boot by creating and saving lilo.conf in beaver.

Here is my lilo.conf file as an example:

lba32 #enable large disk support
timeout=30 #wait 3 seconds before auto-booting
vga=791
boot=/dev/sdb3 #put Lilo boot loader in partition of target disk
root=/dev/sdb3 #set root to be partition of target disk
image=/boot/linux24
label=DSL
initrd=/boot/minirt24.gz
read-only
APPEND="ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init lang=us apm=power-off hda=scsi hdb=scsi hdc=scsi hdd=scsi hde=scsi hdf=scsi hdg=scsi hdh=scsi nomce nodma quiet frugal BOOT_IMAGE=/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX fromhd=/dev/sdb3 restore=sdb4 toram alsa mydsl=sdb4"

You could probably delete all (most?) of the hdx=scsi statements.

Once you've created lilo.conf, you need to do this before re-boot:

Code Sample

# chmod 644 /mnt/sdb3/boot/lilo.conf
# ln -sf /mnt/sdb3/boot /
# lilo -C /mnt/sdb3/boot/lilo.conf

@curaga: As far as I understand it, grub is not an option. My CF card adapter is direct-mounted on the motherboard - this is not a normal PC. It's an Arcom Apollo. I read in another post on here that the mo-bo mounted CF interface was hardwired to be IDE1 Master. And if I specify "nopcmcia" on boot, it always appears as hdc. What I've inferred is this: hda=ide0 master, hdb=ide0 slave, hdc=ide1 master, etc. Am I right or off track here? Anyway, I've also read that grub needs MBR of hda, so I can't use grub. This disk won't be hda, right?

Please tell me if I've put all the pieces together correctly for the above info - if not I may be wasting a whole lot of time with this...

@Juanito: Thanks for this, it's what I've been trying to do mostly. I've got the lilo.conf file as I believe it should be (pretty much the same as yours). But my problem was in getting the lilo program to run on the CF card. I think it was trying to write to the CD as it kept spitting out "Fatal: creat /boot/map~: Read-only file system". Even though I thought the CD loads into ram and thus the file system should be writable...
Anyway, I tried it with the symlink and it finishes with "Added DSL *", but still doesn't boot.

Aah, I just went and examined frugal_lilo.sh and now I see how it tries to write lilo to the disk and where those commands come from. I tried to replicate them, but received the same errors. It appears Lilo just can't/won't write to the CF card.

I'm not sure if this is relevant or not, but during boot, this is displayed:

Code Sample

hdc: attached ide-disk driver.
hdc: task_no_data_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hdc: task_no_data_intr: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }

Anyway, my solution so far has been to do the frugal lilo install to a standard 3.5" disk and dd copy it to the CF. But that hasn't worked yet. I'm still going.

I tried to run lilo the same as suggested above, but onto my 3.5" disk (hda) after the frugal install, to overwrite lilo with the lilo.conf altered to reflect the fact that it would be on hdc, not hda (so I could dd copy with no problems). But lilo won't run if the specified boot partition isn't on the disk it's running on - at least, I think that's what the error message meant. Is there anyway to force lilo to disregard the contents of the lilo.conf file and just do it?

Thanks.

MBR just means the first 512 bytes of an hd. Why wouldn't a cf card have those? hda is just the most common hard disk, grub can boot from any disk or partition marked as bootable (not even MBR is needed).

From googling I see that many have gotten grub working on cf. Try it!

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