Laptops :: pcmcia compact flash card boot

Hello forum people. Thanks to all that have helped me revive my old laptop and turn it into an excellent web server based on dsl linux.
I'm currently booting from a floppy and running v3.4 out of a usb flash memory stick. A key capability of my server is that I can reboot the system remotely.

Now I want to move on to using a pcmcia flash card setup to increase the speed of the system. My usb interface is limited to v1 speeds. (By way of background, the ide interface is dead.)

I need to be able to boot from a single floppy to get the remote boot to work right. Reading the forum has left me with the impression it takes two floppy discs to boot up from a pcmcia card. The second floppy has the card manager among other things. I'm also assuming that if I use a usb2 pcmcia interface card I'll have similar problems.

Is there any way around this?

yes, you could just copy the module for your pcmcia network card to the bootfloppy, and edit linuxrc to load it.. The second floppy only has additional modules, I think the cardmanager is on the image..

The second floppy is not just pcmcia modules.
It contains a statically built cardmgr and the etc/ directory required for pcmcia to function, as well as the collection of pcmcia modules.

If you are really into hacking minirt24.gz, I suppose you could drop all the scsi modules from the first floppy and see if you have room enough for the cardmgr the etc/ directory and a minimal set of pcmcia modules from the second floppy.

Of course this would be very specific to your hardware.

I know it does not fit in a generic manner, otherwise I would have released such.

Uh-oh. Shouldn't speak about stuff I'm not sure about :blush:

Thanks for the responses.

I wonder if it is possible to use a small usb memory stick for the contents of the second floppy. If so, how do I get this to happen automatically on boot?

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