image for a cf card

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: image for a cf card
started by: xxooss

Posted by xxooss on April 28 2006,18:22

Does anyone have a bootable image for a cfcard? Try as I might i can't seem to make on correctly. I am trying to boot my new system I built with a few parts I bought from the mini-itx store! <wink , donation , wink>
thanks in advance

Posted by doobit on April 28 2006,18:25

Describe what you have done so far. For me the easiect way was to start with the live CD, boot with the boot line commands dsl norestore base
When you get to the desktop, right click on it and choose tools, installs, Frugal Grub install.

Posted by roberts on April 28 2006,18:29

I typically just place the CF into the CF-IDE adaptor and make that the primary drive (hda) into any old white box pc. Boot from DSL cdrom using the install option.

boot: install

Then from the menu select:

5. Frugal Lilo Compact Flash Install

Then the CF/IDE can be booted from this PC or moved into another PC or even with the right adaptor used in a laptop to replace the laptop hardrive.

Posted by xxooss on April 28 2006,18:32

thanks for the fast responses. I have tried to do the frugal install from the live cd inside dsl and that didnt work for some reason. let me try the two ways you both have described and I will get back to ya.

Posted by xxooss on April 28 2006,18:59

well it seems that dsl hangs when probing my extra SATA drive, it finds the onboard controller fine and finds all the other ide devices but it hangs on hdf.

Is ther a way to tell it not to probe SATA? like "dsl no{hdf} or something like that?

on a side note it will install if i doo the no hardware detection but then my usb card reader wont show up

sorry for the confusion. this is when i am booting from liveCD, not the mini-itx system i am trying to get set up

Posted by xxooss on April 28 2006,20:11

well now it gets interesting...LOL

I am in dsl on my new system that i booted from a usb pen drive. all is working perfect. I do a CFDISK and create a 50mb partition on the cf card and then create a logical for the rest of it. OH and the wierd part is I have to do this from a terminal using the sudo command since when i right click-apps-tools-etc... it says it cant open the drives and so I am assuming I need to be root.

Anyway i create the partitions and tell it to do a install from the terminal since ii have to use sudo. I do a sudo dsl-hdinstall. It goes through the motions and after it completes i try and boot, says damaged or no boot partition. I do a cfdisk again and the card reads as a 1gb fat32 windows partition.

anyway can someone please post a link to where I might download an image like the one they sell on the cfcards? thanks

Posted by doobit on April 28 2006,20:37

Try it the way I did it.
Boot from a CD or pen drive - it doesn't matter. I've used either one.

Open a terminal and type sudo su
cfdisk /dev/hdxx (whatever the CF card name is on your system)
delete all active partitions and write
create a single linux (type 83 ) partition and set the boot flag to boot.
write the partition table again
Quit
Now, just for the heck of it, format the CF disk
Open a terminal
type sudo su
mke2fs /dev/hdxx (whatever your CF disk is)
you should see verbage telling you how the sectors and stuff are being written.
exit
Now do the frugal grub hard drive install from the dsl menu. It will ask if you want to format the drive. Say no.
Answer yes to new install
tell it to install from your pendrive
As long as you are not using toram when you boot from the pendrive, it should install OK.
It will tell you when it's finished and you can exit. Don't abort until then.

Posted by xxooss on April 28 2006,21:22

Well i did exactly as you detailed but there was a few more messages while doing the install, the one that concerns me is " you will need to reboot to finish the HD install"

I did as it asked and rebooted and booted dsl back up from the pen drive. Just for kicks I went in and checked the cf card with mke2fs and it showed all the info. I shutdown, and started back up sans the usb pen and it gave me the same message, dammaged boot partition

Oh and I was NOT telling cfdisk to "write" OMG N00b

I figured this out as I was going to try and read the cfcard in my windows box, I booted to the live cd and did cfdisk and just deleted the first partition without even thinking, it was my 40gb main drive! i felt sick but since I didn't hit "write" I was saved by the grace of the noob god

Anyway I am still stuck but feel we are getting closer. Any other ideas?

thanks

Posted by doobit on April 28 2006,21:40

OK, you didn't mention before that you had a hard drive. If you want to boot from the IDE CF drive,then you need to set it as master (little jumper), and set your BIOS to boot from that CF hard drive first (probably hdd1)

Posted by xxooss on April 28 2006,21:53

Quote (doobit @ April 28 2006,17:40)

well i didnt mention it because it was my other system so it didnt matter.

Anyhow i got it to work! All I did was choose lilo instead of grub and it worked!
I have no idea so don't ask LOL

Well now it on to saving my settings :P

thanks for the help, couldn't have done it without you

Peace

Posted by roberts on April 29 2006,00:15

If you saw:
"You must reboot to continue the final stage of the hard drive install."

Then you ran the wrong type of install for a compact flash device.

Doing a normal hard drive install to flash devices will drasticaly shorten the life of the device.

Posted by xxooss on April 29 2006,05:19

Yep I guess I did. I dont remember seeing anything that said CF device in the dsl menu oh well.

I was wondering if you wanted the details on dslinstall hanging on my system when I had the SATA drives connected. Its not a bug, just something that has yet to be implemented maybe? I can give you more details if you like. Thanks again for all the help. I will be asking more questions I am sure. Oh and I was wondering if the people who hang in IRC are connected with dsl and john etc...last time i was there it seemed like a rather harsh place. just my 2 cents worth which is why i was so happy when I got such a fast response to my question here.

Peace

Posted by roberts on April 29 2006,05:30

When booting from liveCD at the first boot prompt type only install this will bring up the menu that I had previously mentioned.

Regards SATA hanging, maybe try booting with noscsi
Not sure, I don't have access to sata to know.

For sata support try dsl-n

Posted by xxooss on April 29 2006,07:33

Quote (roberts @ April 29 2006,01:30)

I tirned the SATA drive off and it booted up no problem, turn the SATA HD on and it hangs at the point it is trying to probe it, hdfx in my case.

As for the install from the live cd, I did get to the point in the gui where it was just some text asking what you wanted to do and iirc #5 was the frugal install for the cf card, maybe #6 hehe. I tried it and had the same issue as b4 but who knows, its working well now.

Ok just about have the setttings figured out ...now to find someone to hold my hand while trying to get my wlan to be recognized. Can't I just copy the inf file for the device into a folder on the dsl machine so it looks for it at detection?

Is ther a step by step for dummies? as in ...

1. go to bla directory and then create a dir called /wlan0. put file here or whatever?

edit: I will try the dsl-n install tomorrow, we have storms here. thanks again.