Laptops :: pcmcia compact flash card boot

Why a second one, is the current one too full?

I was trying to move away from usb flash to faster cardbus flash. The ideal setup would be to boot from floppy directly to cardbus flash but since that doesn't look promising I'm ok with continuing to use usb flash for holding the pcmcia floppy image. Any ideas on how to do that?

How 'bout trying to fit it on the floppy first?

Getting it to mount a usb stick and use cardmanager from there won't be difficult, just alter the "frompcmcia" area of linuxrc..

Quote (Big_Pc_Man @ Sep. 03 2007,14:27)

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, it is possible, I've done it for one of my home-made picture frames.

Format a floppy to 1.7M (theres not enough room if you format it to normal capacity).

Edit the minirt24.gz image from the first boot floppy, add the pcmcia modules and the cardmgr, and remove all unneccessary modules/files.

I had to do lots of experimenting to figure out which modules could be removed, but I now have a 1,7M floppy which boots and reads the KNOPPIX image from the CF card in the pcmcia adpater.

It probably doesn't work in all computers, since I removed lots of files other computers might need. I think I have also removed lots of the text it prints during the boot. (This is a picture frame and I don't want lots of text on the screen during boot.) It's got a boot logo you probably don't want, and it's not finished, but it's here if you want it:

http://www.bredo.nu/temp/bootfloppy.img

Thank you. I was about ready to give up on this.
I have not edited a minirt24.gz file before. What program did you use to edit this file and how did you determine what could be deleted.

I've looked at the contents with winrar, it was a mess so that won't work.

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