PCMCIA Install
Forum: HD Install
Topic: PCMCIA Install
started by: BeardedJon
Posted by BeardedJon on Mar. 02 2006,18:20
How do I install DSL to a PCMCIA Card?I have an IBM 105mb PCMCIA Hard Disk Drive and I would like to put DSL on it to transfer from an old Winbook XL Laptop (which boots DSL just fine from the CD) to a Fujitsu Point 510 tablet which only has PCMCIA and Floppy (no USB).
I'm new to Linux (Jon - day 2) so I have little clue what I'm doing. Any help would be appreciated.
Posted by roberts on Mar. 02 2006,19:47
I don't think this is an easy task especially on older computers using boot floppies.The pcmcia modules would need to be placed into minirt24.gz and the linuxrc adjusted to insmod and use them. This would most likely be a two floppy disk set to boot from then find and load the compressed image file which would be from a poorman's install on the pcmcia device.This is a project that I keep thinking I should attempt as alot of older laptops have floppy and pcmcia drives. We could then forgo the harddrive and use boot floppy + CF/PCMCIA.
Of course you can use any pcmcia hard drive, or pcmcia adapter with CF as storage for a cdrom or other booted DSL.
Posted by BeardedJon on Mar. 02 2006,20:47
My idea to solve this would be install (or copy) DSL to the PCMCIA from the Winbook and create a boot floppy that says "look at the PCMCIA card" but again, I don't have the skills to put this together.Are you up to the task? Peer pressure. DO IT! DO IT!
Please, I beg you.
Posted by roberts on Mar. 03 2006,15:02
OK. I am looking into this. Stay tuned.
Posted by BeardedJon on Mar. 03 2006,19:20
Tuned. Thank you.
Posted by roberts on Mar. 03 2006,22:50
Much progress on this... But...It means two floppies. Just imposible to fit all on one floppy.
I do have the basics working.
I have a pcmcia holder with a 256MB CF and floppy drive. No hard drive and no cdrom in a very old laptop.
The install is only the KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX compressed standard DSL image file.
Systems boots cleanly except...
It does add another wrinkle to how things work.
Since pcmcia is used to boot from that means cardmgr is started before the image is found which means it is impossbile to have all possible pcmcia modules for other than boot devices available, or even to start them, i.e., pcmcia wireless network cards and such.
But the work around is ...
I have found that I must boot from floppies with only pcmcia/CF installed and NOT the pcmcia wireless card. System boots up cleanly then I insert the pcmcia wireless card and wait for the beep. Then using iwconfig GUI I am off and running wireless with only pcmcia/CF.
So good news is that booting is working.
Bad news, two floppy disks required and no auto/load and go other pcmcia devices. They must be manually inserted after bootup is completed and then configured. This means that they cannot be in the backup,i.e., bootlocal.sh. It could be a saved script in the backup and then manually run.
Still I need to do some cosmetics and further testing.
Posted by BeardedJon on Mar. 03 2006,23:03
Thanks. Were you speaking English? I understood "2 floppies" and that was about it. I will wait until "cosmetics and further testing" is completed than ask for a translation (aka DSL 2 Floppy PCMCIA Install for Dummies).
Posted by cRunchy on Mar. 04 2006,00:58
Hi,This sounds exciting as I too am interested in booting my DSL from CF in PCMCIA adapter...
I am also a little lacking in Linux skills to follow what's been said so far.
Anyway a slightly different thought occured to me and I don't know if this is even applicable to Knoppix.
Is it possible to boot DSL from a floppy using DOS or hybrid software?
I'm not suggesting this is the best way but just thinking out loud....
After loads of reading around I see that Puppy Linux uses a DOS boot disk to get into USB. (I've read so much i might be getting confused between Puppy or some other???)..
I also see that it is no longer possible to get hold of the PuppyLinux PCMCIA floppy boot starter disk.
I am not sure why but I suspect because it used commercial software and had to be withdrawn???
If the boot loader just used the DOS PCMCIA drivers I am thinking of they occupy 700KB-ish but possibly could be slimmed down..
This may not be an apealing way around but it is just another potential for doing stuff.. also if it's possible to boot from a DOS app then it would make an easy way of droping it into say 'a Win98 boot choice...
However I came to DSL for the challenge and enjoyment in learning a little about Linux so any way of getting my PCMCIA card up and running and DSL booted is great to me.
==
PS:
I understand the concept of what you are saying Roberts' about not having the wireless card etc.. enabled at start..
This was the downside of this whole concept of booting into a PCMCIA HD\CF type card. It could tie up the slot.
For me personally I am happy to sacrafice any other use of the PCMCIA slot as for me it's just a learning platform.. though I can see how others may want to swap to a network card after boot.
Posted by cbagger01 on Mar. 05 2006,07:30
You don't need DOS or any other OS to boot DSL from PCMCIA.Why?
Because the linux kernel and miniroot intial ramdisk can already be stored on a floppy disk or disks.
The problem is:
The typical DSL boot floppy does not contain the drivers for your PCMCIA card controller chip.
This means that it can't see any of your PCMCIA devices including a CF card, so the boot will fail.
One solution to get DSL on such a machine is known as a "poorman's install", and it involves booting your original OS (DOS/Win95/Win98/WinME) and copy the contents of the CD-R disk over to your C:\ drive, IE: C:\KNOPPIX\KNOPPIX
But this is not a portable solution.
If your computer has a USB port, the portable solution is DSL USB pendrive install + USB bootfloppy.
But Robert's project should solve this. It appears to be a 2 floppy disk set that contains the usual DSL bootup files AND THE PCMCIA CONTROLLER DRIVERS.
Unfortunately, when you load up the PCMCIA drivers at the very beginning of the bootup process, it caused problems later on during the KNOPPIX autodetection process because the PCMCIA drivers are already up and running and the scripts do not expect this situation.
So his "rough draft" kinda works, but the user then needs to manually set up his additional devices because of the autodetect issue.
Hopefully this explanation is both accurate and also closer to "English" as opposed to KNOPPIX boot process developer-speak.
Posted by cRunchy on Mar. 05 2006,14:48
I have setup and tried the DOS solution. It would be quite easy if not for the fact that loading DSL breaks the dos driver conectivity with the pcmcia.. therefore only a fragment is loaded and it freezes.It probably could be done in DOS but as you say... if there is a linux solution that would be better.. partly as the DOS drivers have speed and corruption issues.
Posted by BeardedJon on Mar. 05 2006,18:30
cbagger01 - plain enough english. Thank you.
Posted by roberts on Mar. 05 2006,23:37
This is a wrap. Now I need to focus back on the core of DSL Expect the pcmcia boot floppies to be part of the DSL 2.3 release which should be RSN!
Posted by isharkie on Mar. 31 2006,10:03
Hi,Apologies if the answer to this should be obvious. It isn't to me.
2.3 is out and I've downloaded it. Where would I find the 2 boot floppies necessary to get my machine to boot from pcmcia cf card. I've been dying to do this for ages and was ever so pleased
when I discovered this thread.Thanks,
I
Posted by cbagger01 on April 01 2006,05:46
< http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/damnsmall/current/ >
Posted by isharkie on April 01 2006,09:45
Thank you very much for taking the time to point that out to me. I realise now that should have been obvious.Thx
I
Posted by cox_douglas on April 16 2006,23:18
DSL experts --I am successfully booting with the PCMCIA CF floppies on a very old laptop (compaq 4131T), and the system comes up great with one exception -- my HERMES I pcmcia network card won't work (enterasys brand). I have tried popping it in after the pcmcia cf card is detected as /dev/hdc1, but that doesn't seem to help.
When I reinsert the card I get the low frequency beep that indicates the card is not recognized, although lsmod reports that hermes/orinoco/orinoco_cs have been properly loaded. I tried updating resolv.conf with my nameserver, and I also tried updating /etc/network/interfaces with the lines:
| Code Sample |
| auto eth0 iface eth0 inet dhcp |
then restarting the network, but the command fails. 'pump -i eth0' also fails. Since the network card will work with the CF card when I run off the CD perhaps there's a script somewhere that I'm missing? The boot parameters I'm using are 'dsl lowram frompcmcia vga=normal'. Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide, and great work on the PCMCIA CF boot -- new life for old laptops!
Doug
Posted by roberts on April 17 2006,16:02
I have found that I must boot from floppies with only pcmcia/CF installed and NOT the pcmcia wireless card. System boots up cleanly then I insert the pcmcia wireless card and wait for the beep. Then using iwconfig GUI I am off and running wireless with only pcmcia/CF. Does your card work with DSL? Can you test on another system with a bootable cdrom?
Also, might try the pcmcia tool and click on the ident tab.
Also, might be an irq conflict on this particular machine.
Maybe settable in the bios?
Posted by cox_douglas on April 18 2006,01:13
Thanks very much for the reply! The pcmcia ethernet card does indeed work on dsl, and on this particular compaq machine as well...but only when I boot from CD. I tried the GUI iwconfig, inserting the wireless card after completing the pcmcia boot, as you suggested, but I still receive the "Operation failed" message. I think your idea about an IRQ conflict is a good one, I'll have to explore the BIOS to see if there's any way to adjust that.Meanwhile, I'd like to extract the pertinent data from the appropriate configuration files after I boot from the cdrom and actually have the network up and running. I might be able to edit the appropriate files once I'm booted into the PCMCIA CF version of DSL, then get the card configured from there. Can you suggest which conf files I should check out, in addition to /etc/pcmcia/interfaces and /etc/resolv.conf?
Thanks again!
Doug
Posted by roberts on April 18 2006,03:57
I would boot with the additional option of nodhcpThis will make sure that pump is not interferring.
Let machine boot up from pcmcia/CF
I would looks at System Stats and be sure no extra network modules are loaded. If so, remove them.
Then insert wireless card. Wait for beep
You can check to see it by using
$ iwconfig
It should show an unconfigured network card the its device name.
If it did not then you may have to manually insmod the module(s) that you know from running the card with liveCD.
Check again with iwconfig. If you see an entry then proceed to configure the card with whichever tool you used before. sid, wep, etc.
HTH
Posted by DaveJ45 on May 09 2006,04:15
This might be a little off topic, but this seems to be the most likely place to ask, since everyone on this topic is 'all about' booting from PCMCIA hard drives with a boot floppy.I have about 3 small lappys of various types, all of which I would like to up with DSL permanent HD installs.
One has already been set up with a 'non-frugal' HD install.
I have a small DOS partition, a LINUX Swap partition, and the balance of the hard drive for DSL. I use GRUB, and can boot into DSL or DOS. The first one was easy, it has a bootable CD-Rom.
The other 2 machines only have floppies and hard drives. One has an expansion port which will supports SCSI devices, and I do have an SCSI cd-drive/hard drive unit for this machine.
I do have a PCMCIA ATA hard drive, and all three machines have PCMCIA slots that can accept this drive.
How would I go about putting the required data needed on the PCMCIA drive, and then use this drive to configure the machines without bootable CDs, to do a permanent DSL install on these machines, and, what steps would I use to accomplish this?
DaveJ45