Unable to boot from pcmcia card


Forum: Laptops
Topic: Unable to boot from pcmcia card
started by: Ham13

Posted by Ham13 on Oct. 14 2006,23:50
Using a Toshiba 4900CT wit 24 MB. Ram. Boot floppy and pcmcia disk. All goes well untill I get message "Unable to find image". DSL appears to scan all devices but does not find my pcmcia cd rom. The CD ROM is a Panasonic KXL-D740. The drive uses a scsi driver under Windows and functions properly when I use Win 95. I burned the image at 4X since it is a 4X drive.

All suggestions appreciated.

Thanks

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Oct. 15 2006,04:31
What scsi controller do you have? (is it detected on start?)

Maybe you can use the fromhd=/dev/sdXx bootcode...

Posted by Ham13 on Oct. 15 2006,14:23
The card shows as a scsi device in the Windows device manager. I'm not sure which if any scsi controller exists. How do I verify that the controller was found on boot up? DSL scans the devices it found but goes so fast I can't follow it. I'm dumped to a "dumb" shell with limited commands. I am unable to use LS to list the /dev directory. What is the usual /dev name of a scsi pcmcia drive? Will try your boot up suggestion.
Posted by Ham13 on Oct. 15 2006,17:57
Some more info.

I copied the image to the HDD and was able to boot DSL. This allowed me to see the messages:

    modprobe parport_cs
    get device info socket 1 failed ... no such device

The interface card is in slot 1.

The modem in slot 0 was correctly identified.

Is it possible that DSL thinks the interface card is a parallel port?

I also cannot get to the cd from DSL. The HDA1 partition is mounted on the /mnt/cdrom directory oddly enough.

The CD should be scd something but what.

Posted by roberts on Oct. 15 2006,18:37
If you are getting the initial boot screen via your pcmcia cdrom drive, but failure finding the image then try this

At the initial boot prompt:

boot: dsl ide2=0x180 nopcmcia

Posted by Ham13 on Oct. 15 2006,20:09
I use a boot floopy to boot the PC. The image is on the HD. DSL finds this image. The CD ROM image is not found. The pcmcia drive is still not found. Nothing comes from the cd. The system does not know it is there. The /dev/hda1 is mounted on the /mnt/cdrom directory.
Posted by pradi on Oct. 18 2006,13:17
You should download DSL with syslinux ISO and burn to CD. My laptop is installed via PCMCIA CDROM also. And refer the part of frugal install from < http://www.mizuhoradio.com/persona....cn.html >
Posted by Ham13 on Oct. 19 2006,00:58
Well some more info:

Changed the interface card to a newer one

Now when DSL boots it first finds the DSL image on /dev/hda1
Then it starts cardmanager and correctly identifies the PCMCIA card and the CD-ROM (SCD0) can be mounted as ro.


If I change the name of the Knoppix directory on the HDD and instruct dsl to boot from the PCMCIA card (Either Syslinux or Isolinux image)

    dsl frompcmcia 2

It prompts for the PCMCIA modules and cardmanager starts but this time the DSL image is not found. Cardmanager does not report any errors. I'm dumped to a shell that is so limited the only thing I can do is to reboot.

Is it possible that the CD-ROM is found but not mounted or is it somthing more...?

Thanks for the replys

Posted by pradi on Oct. 28 2006,02:24
I expect you CDROM is OK.So if you use DSL syslinux package. You dont need to copy any file located on HDD. You can just do like you are using Live CD and let its process continued until boot complete. After that you should able right click to do follow DSL menu. I recommend to part hdd partition as that links done and use it as a guidance.
Posted by Ham13 on Nov. 03 2006,00:26
Been there, done that. The CD ROM is recognized after DSL boots from the HDD and cardmgr starts. Booting from the boot floppy with the pcmcia floppy does not work. The cardmgr supplied on the pcmcia boot disk does not find the CDROM.

So i boot from the floppy and use the image on the HDD. Unfortunatly fluxbox will not work this way. It just blanks the screen and freezes. I'm to the point of frustration and maybe its not worth the effort. Too many problems!

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