Compact Flash HD Install

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Compact Flash HD Install
started by: Exsuscito

Posted by Exsuscito on July 04 2006,12:59

I am trying to get a unit to boot exclusively off an Compact Flash card plugged into a standard IDE interface. I managed to get this working when I did a USB-HDD install from the LiveCD, but is that the right way to do this? Shouldn't I be able to do a dsl-hdinstall to the disk? I did this booting from a USB thumbdrive with DSL on it and the dsl-hdinstall appeared to work, but the system does not boot. I get the following error:

GRUB Hard Disk Error

I partitioned a 256MB compact flash disk the following way:
/dev/hdc1 5MB, Primary, ext2, bootable
/dev/hdc2 251MB, Primary, ext2

I did dsl-hdinstall to /dev/hdc2
I then ran dsl-installboot for /dev/hdc1
I then made sure that the System.map and linux24 files were copied to the /dev/hdc1/boot folder

Documentation says that GRUB Hard Disk Error means that the bootloader could not determine the size of the disk. This is hard to believe since it has booted from it using the USB-HDD method.

It's also possible that my MBR is messed up because I chose /dev/hdc as an option once when running dsl-installboot.

What am I doing wrong?

Posted by Exsuscito on July 05 2006,10:09

After doing more research I've found that it makes more sense to employ the USB-HDD boot disk install on the CF card, even if the CF card is to be ultimately treated like an IDE hard drive.

The main justification for this is because Linux has a habbit of making extensive writes to the hard drive (i.e. this is especially true for log files and log rotation), which can wear out CF cards relatively quickly. With the USB-HDD boot disk install method, all the disk writes are performed on the RAMdisk instead of the CF card, so the CF card is left alone and won't be worn out so easily.

Reference: < Knoppix CF Install Guide >

I've already tested the USB-HDD install method on the 256MB CF card with 100% boot success. Then after I boot from the CF card, I will tweak the installed operating system to behave more like a permanently installed operating system (more updates to come at that time).