Running from a parallel Backpack CD-RW.

Forum: Laptops
Topic: Running from a parallel Backpack CD-RW.
started by: marctwayne

Posted by marctwayne on Dec. 18 2005,02:05

I've got a Thinkpad 750Ce I'm trying to put DSL on to play with. The only CD drive I have that will work with the laptop is a parallel Backpack CD-RW. I ofcourse can't boot directly to it, so I have made the boot floppy for DSL. The boot floppy starts fine, but it doesn't find the parallel Backpack drive. So it would seem the boot floppy doesn't support this drive. The manufacture says that kernel 2.4.4 and up has built in support for it. Does anyone have any ideas that might help?

Thanks in advance.

Posted by sarah on Dec. 18 2005,04:36

I'm currently tryiing to create a boot floppy to boot from parallel drive (without success so far :o/ ).
Are you able to get DSL 1.5? It's possible that DSL 1.5 will work with your machine (if you use the earlier DSL boot disk to boot it).
< ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/damnsmall/archive/ >
and you want the dsl-1.5.iso and the bootfloppy-1.5.img
Maybe try that and see what happens?

I have gathered (being new to DSL and not knowing a lot about Linux though I've used it on and off over the years) that when the kernel in DSL went from 2.4.26 to 2.4.31 from dsl version 1.5 to 2.0, they had to cut a lot of the modules from both the boot floopy and from the DSL OS itself to make room.
You could try having a floppy with the additional modules that support your CD drive. The cut modules are available at
< ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/damnsmall/current/ >
and the file is additional_modules.tar.gz (a bit over 4MB)
I would give better instructions in that regard if I could make it work for myself!
Try searching the forum for information on putting additional modules in the boot floppy? (And if you can make it work please post what you did :o) )

::Edit:: And now I've reread the original post, I've realise that the kernel marctwayne mentions is 2.4.4 and not 2.4.24 which is how I read it... DSL 2.0 is based on kernel 2.4.31(.) There are a couple of people around who have remastered DSL using a different kernel but they're not official and so not really supported by the forums I guess. You can find links to their customised DSL by searching the forum.

Cheers and beers
Sarah

Posted by marctwayne on Dec. 18 2005,04:55

I've already tried the DSL 1.5. It didn't work either. I'll take a look at the additional modules tomorrow.

Posted by marctwayne on Dec. 18 2005,23:44

Ok, the additional_modules.tar.gz file doesn't seem to contain any parallel ide modules. Now I booted another machine the DSL CD so I could see if the required modules are on the CD. They do appear to be on the CD and I can get them off the CD. The question now is, how exactly does one load them booting from floppy?

Posted by cbagger01 on Dec. 19 2005,07:03

The backpack works in KNOPPIX 3.4 and should work in DSL.

However, booting from one is a different story.

In addition to the driver modules (should be present in the ISO), you need to mknod a device for your backpack.

Even if you do that, your drive does not appear as an ordinary IDE or SCSI cdrom drive IE: hda or sda

It appears as some other name, I forget the exact spelling.

So you will need to modify the boot process to look at this device name when searching for filesystems that contain the KNOPPIX file.

All of which is possible, although it is not simple to do with a boot floppy until you know how to put all of the pieces together.