pcmcia compact flash card boot

Forum: Laptops
Topic: pcmcia compact flash card boot
started by: Big_Pc_Man

Posted by Big_Pc_Man on Sep. 03 2007,18:27

Hello forum people. Thanks to all that have helped me revive my old laptop and turn it into an excellent web server based on dsl linux.
I'm currently booting from a floppy and running v3.4 out of a usb flash memory stick. A key capability of my server is that I can reboot the system remotely.

Now I want to move on to using a pcmcia flash card setup to increase the speed of the system. My usb interface is limited to v1 speeds. (By way of background, the ide interface is dead.)

I need to be able to boot from a single floppy to get the remote boot to work right. Reading the forum has left me with the impression it takes two floppy discs to boot up from a pcmcia card. The second floppy has the card manager among other things. I'm also assuming that if I use a usb2 pcmcia interface card I'll have similar problems.

Is there any way around this?

Posted by curaga on Sep. 04 2007,14:59

yes, you could just copy the module for your pcmcia network card to the bootfloppy, and edit linuxrc to load it.. The second floppy only has additional modules, I think the cardmanager is on the image..

Posted by roberts on Sep. 04 2007,17:51

The second floppy is not just pcmcia modules.
It contains a statically built cardmgr and the etc/ directory required for pcmcia to function, as well as the collection of pcmcia modules.

If you are really into hacking minirt24.gz, I suppose you could drop all the scsi modules from the first floppy and see if you have room enough for the cardmgr the etc/ directory and a minimal set of pcmcia modules from the second floppy.

Of course this would be very specific to your hardware.

I know it does not fit in a generic manner, otherwise I would have released such.

Posted by curaga on Sep. 05 2007,15:38

Uh-oh. Shouldn't speak about stuff I'm not sure about :blush:

Posted by Big_Pc_Man on Sep. 05 2007,15:41

Thanks for the responses.

I wonder if it is possible to use a small usb memory stick for the contents of the second floppy. If so, how do I get this to happen automatically on boot?

Posted by curaga on Sep. 05 2007,16:40

Why a second one, is the current one too full?

Posted by Big_Pc_Man on Sep. 05 2007,23:23

I was trying to move away from usb flash to faster cardbus flash. The ideal setup would be to boot from floppy directly to cardbus flash but since that doesn't look promising I'm ok with continuing to use usb flash for holding the pcmcia floppy image. Any ideas on how to do that?

Posted by curaga on Sep. 06 2007,14:36

How 'bout trying to fit it on the floppy first?

Getting it to mount a usb stick and use cardmanager from there won't be difficult, just alter the "frompcmcia" area of linuxrc..

Posted by bredita on Sep. 08 2007,08:50

Quote (Big_Pc_Man @ Sep. 03 2007,14:27)

I need to be able to boot from a single floppy to get the remote boot to work right. Reading the forum has left me with the impression it takes two floppy discs to boot up from a pcmcia card. The second floppy has the card manager among other things. I'm also assuming that if I use a usb2 pcmcia interface card I'll have similar problems.

Is there any way around this?

Yes, it is possible, I've done it for one of my home-made picture frames.

Format a floppy to 1.7M (theres not enough room if you format it to normal capacity).

Edit the minirt24.gz image from the first boot floppy, add the pcmcia modules and the cardmgr, and remove all unneccessary modules/files.

I had to do lots of experimenting to figure out which modules could be removed, but I now have a 1,7M floppy which boots and reads the KNOPPIX image from the CF card in the pcmcia adpater.

It probably doesn't work in all computers, since I removed lots of files other computers might need. I think I have also removed lots of the text it prints during the boot. (This is a picture frame and I don't want lots of text on the screen during boot.) It's got a boot logo you probably don't want, and it's not finished, but it's here if you want it:

< http://www.bredo.nu/temp/bootfloppy.img >

Posted by Big_Pc_Man on Sep. 08 2007,12:17

Thank you. I was about ready to give up on this.
I have not edited a minirt24.gz file before. What program did you use to edit this file and how did you determine what could be deleted.

I've looked at the contents with winrar, it was a mess so that won't work.

Posted by curaga on Sep. 08 2007,13:00

Don't use winrar! That would mean you're in M$, not having a filesystem with proper permissions (ie editing and saving there would cause big trouble)

BTW how could winrar see the contents? Does it understand ext2 loops nowadays?

It's a filesystem, you don't need a specific app to edit it, just mount it in Linux..

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Sep. 08 2007,14:25

Quote

BTW how could winrar see the contents? Does it understand ext2 loops nowadays?

Probably just gunzip'ing it.

Posted by Big_Pc_Man on Sep. 08 2007,18:20

Ok, I should have said modify instead of edit. I know it's a file system, I just thought winrar would uncompress the file and allow me a quick view of the file system.

So I tried:
gunzip minirt24.gz

that created minirt24 in /tmp
then:
mount -o loop minirt24 /tmp

Nothing happened. The command prompt returned with no messages. Minirt24 did not mount as near as I can tell.

Now What?

Posted by curaga on Sep. 09 2007,08:12

well you obviously can't mount over itself!

When you mount in a dir, the contents of the dir disappear for the duration of the mount. Move it elsewhere and then mount it

Posted by Big_Pc_Man on Sep. 09 2007,15:06

That actually was pretty funny.

Ok I made a new directory /mnt/minirt and did:
mount -o loop /tmp/minirt24 /mnt/minirt

That seems to have done the trick.I can now see the file system.

Thanks

Posted by Big_Pc_Man on Sep. 09 2007,17:10

Ok, I admit it I forgot how to create a 1.7Mb boot floppy. I tryed dd if=bootfloppy.img of=/dev/fd0 and get the no space left message. I also tried dd if=bootfloppy.img of=/dev/fd0u1680 and that just sends records in and out somewhere.

What's the trick guys?

Thanks

Posted by roberts on Sep. 09 2007,17:18

There is a floppy tool in the DSLpanel for such things.

However, I doubt you will be able to cherry pick items from both floppies to fit on a single floppy.

Likely you would have to have a 2.88MB super floppy.

A more likely senario is to place the pcmcia/ from the second floppy onto your usb pendrive and then change the loadpcmia function to first insmod the usb modules and then mount the pendrive under additional_modules.

Posted by Big_Pc_Man on Sep. 09 2007,19:26

Thanks for the tip.

Alright then, I'm going to need a little help with this. I've added the pcmcia directory to the usb sdb2 flash drive. Sdb1 contains the boot image. I have a sdc1&2 duplicate flash drive attached to the cardbus adapter. I'm ready to go.

I have no idea where the loadpcmia function is. What file are we talking about and where is it?

Posted by roberts on Sep. 10 2007,05:17

Having two threads on your request does not really help matters.
I am therefore closing the second thread.

I was under the impression that you had been using a boot floppy with a pendrive but your computer only supports usb 1.1 and you were successful but just wanted more speed.

I thought you wanted to run the pcmcia 2 floppy system, which works with a CF/PCMCIA.

However, you did not like having to change to the second floppy.

I thought you wanted to try placing the second floppy contects on the usb 1.1 pendrive, then boot floppy, usb 1.1 pendrive and finally searching for KNOPPIX on the CF/PCMCIA.

This should be possible by modifying the linuxrc script inside minirt24.gz, and in particular the loadpcmcia function.

You would have to insmod the usbmodules and then change the existing mount floppy command to mount the pendrive in order to use the pcmcia device.

Is this indeed what you are attempting?

Posted by Big_Pc_Man on Sep. 10 2007,14:43

yes

Posted by bredita on Sep. 11 2007,18:08

Quote (Big_Pc_Man @ Sep. 09 2007,13:10)

Sorry for replying late, been busy building picture frames

i think I formatted it like this:
fdformat /dev/fd0u1722

and when you mount it also mount it using the same device:
mount /dev/fd0u1722 /mnt/floppy

And the "edit minirt24" thing I found here:
< http://darwish-07.blogspot.com/ >
(Way down on the page, search for minirt24 and you'll find it...)

Its a bit of a struggle to figure out what to remove in order to fit it on a floppy, but it was doable, for me at least. My picture frame is on the wall, and I'm not swapping floppies in order to boot dsl "frompcmcia".

Good luck to anyone who wants to try. Floppies need to be perfect to format them to 1.7M - i went through 5-6 old floppies before I found one that was good enough.

Posted by Big_Pc_Man on Sep. 12 2007,14:45

Thanks for useful information.