PCMCIA Cd-rom drive! arg!

Forum: Laptops
Topic: PCMCIA Cd-rom drive! arg!
started by: Nikosapi

Posted by Nikosapi on July 18 2005,00:13

I have a toshiba portege 3110ct that doesn't have a built in cd-rom drive. So, I use a handy-dandy pcmcia 24x cdrom drive from targus.
The problem is how do I boot into dsl?
Presently I have Mandrake linux running on it but I'm looking for something more *light*.
I don't want to risk repartitioning my hard disk, to install dsl on it I just want to boot off the live cd. (to test if dsl works on it)
When I installed Mandrake, it included a utility that created a bootable diskette with pcmcia support on it and it worked great.
I was wondering if it is possible to use the mandrake boot disk or a winblows one (with pcmcia support on it) to boot dsl with?
Thanks,
-->Nikosapi

Posted by cbagger01 on July 18 2005,19:53

It is difficult, but not impossible to get DSL to boot from a custom boot floppy and pcmcia CDROM drive.

First step is to download the boot floppy image and use a program like "dd" "rawrite" or "rawrite32" to create a boot floppy disk.

Then give it a try - it might just work.

If not, the next easiest thing to do is boot into Mandrake or Win95/98 and simply copy the \knoppix\knoppix file over to C:\knoppix\knoppix (windows) or /knoppix/knoppix or maybe /mnt/hda1/knoppix/knoppix (linux) make sure that you get the case right (all uppercase or all lowercase, I forget).

Then try again with the boot floppy and it might find the knoppix file on your hard drive instead of a cdrom - no repartitioning needed. You just need 50MB of free disk space on your hard drive, usually in the first partition.

If that doesn't work, you will need to build a custom DSL boot disk with drivers for your pcmcia drive and also a modified linuxrc script to search for your unorthodox device name. Is it /dev/scd1?

finally, you may be able to get some help on how to do this by googling for knoppix pcmcia boot disk, because knoppix and DSL use the same boot methods. In fact, the current version of DSL is based on KNOPPIX 3.4 5-17-2004

Hope this helps.

Posted by Nikosapi on July 19 2005,03:57

Thanks

I'll try the first option tomorow, The second if definitly too complicated for me, The third is cool too.
Damn, DSL is so great!
-->Nikosapi