Install in ATAFLASH

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Install in ATAFLASH
started by: dotelpenguin

Posted by dotelpenguin on July 25 2006,16:28

I have a tablet pc, which boots from a 500mb ATA flash card. Curisous if anyone has installed DSL on ATAFlash (pcmcia). the tablet has NO floppy or cdrom, and no way to add one. OS must be installed on 2nd computer. However i'm having touble getting DSL to detect the flash. I run Gentoo on my laptop and can mount the drive manualy, but not when booting dsl.

Is there a way to install DSL to a drive without booting into dsl first?

Thanks

Posted by vawa on Aug. 04 2006,20:44

Hi, I have similar kind of problem. I have sucessfully done a couple of DSL installations on realy different HW configuration, but when i tried to install DSL on CF card in IDE adapter, DSL was unable to see CF as HDA. I tried other linuxes (slax,puppy,DSL-N,etc.) and all of them was able to use my CF card as HDA without any problemns. I started a similar topic as this one on this forum almost two month ago, but noone answered me. I thing that problem may by in different type of HW detection or missing support for flash drives in kernel. But I'm not yet experienced enough to solve this problem alone.

Posted by yiddea on Aug. 22 2006,19:01

I recently bought a Dell Latitude L400 explicitly to run DSL. I got it minus the hard drive so it is ideal for a "no moving parts" installation. The L400 has no built in drives and the unit I got has no external drives so my situation is similar.

This is a work in progress but I will let you know what I have done so far.
1. I installed a 40GB drive with DSL on it from another computer to establish functionality and compatibility and this was a success.
2. I inserted my intended CFcard (Apacer 512MB unit) into my SanDisk PCcard adapter and was able to see it on bootup on the target machine with the temporary hard drive installed. This is with the native FAT partition I used on my old Aero and iPaq. I do not remember if it was 16 or 32.

3. After some experimentation I figured out how to get cfdisk to see the CF card as hde and made a 55MB partition for DSL (hde1) and 460MB partition for files and extensions (hde2).
4. I used the frugal_grub.sh script to install DSL from the LiveCD. I should have mentioned that I did this on a different laptop. I used the alternate laptop on step 3 also but this may not have been required.
5. I intend to put the CF card into my IDE to CF adapter in place of my temporary HDD but I cannot do this until I get the part. I bought a fanless workstation with CF card preinstalled as a reference platform but of course this has not yet arrived either.
6. If all of this worked then I plan on getting an Orinoco PCcard wireless and running the antenna to the laptop lid so the card will fit flush and then I will be done.