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Topic: PCMCIA Install, How do I install to a PCMCIA Card?

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cox_douglas Offline

Group: Members
Posts: 10
Joined: April 2006

Posted: April 16 2006,23:18

DSL experts --
I am successfully booting with the PCMCIA CF floppies on a very old laptop (compaq 4131T), and the system comes up great with one exception -- my HERMES I pcmcia network card won't work (enterasys brand). I have tried popping it in after the pcmcia cf card is detected as /dev/hdc1, but that doesn't seem to help.
When I reinsert the card I get the low frequency beep that indicates the card is not recognized, although lsmod reports that hermes/orinoco/orinoco_cs have been properly loaded. I tried updating resolv.conf with my nameserver, and I also tried updating /etc/network/interfaces with the lines:

Code Sample

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

then restarting the network, but the command fails. 'pump -i eth0' also fails. Since the network card will work with the CF card when I run off the CD perhaps there's a script somewhere that I'm missing? The boot parameters I'm using are 'dsl lowram frompcmcia vga=normal'. Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide, and great work on the PCMCIA CF boot -- new life for old laptops!

Doug

roberts

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Posts: 4983
Joined: Oct. 2003

Posted: April 17 2006,16:02

I have found that I must boot from floppies with only pcmcia/CF installed and NOT the pcmcia wireless card. System boots up cleanly then I insert the pcmcia wireless card and wait for the beep. Then using iwconfig GUI I am off and running wireless with only pcmcia/CF.

Does your card work with DSL? Can you test on another system with a bootable cdrom?

Also, might try the pcmcia tool and click on the ident tab.

Also, might be an irq conflict on this particular machine.
Maybe settable in the bios?

cox_douglas Offline

Group: Members
Posts: 10
Joined: April 2006

Posted: April 18 2006,01:13

Thanks very much for the reply! The pcmcia ethernet card does indeed work on dsl, and on this particular compaq machine as well...but only when I boot from CD. I tried the GUI iwconfig, inserting the wireless card after completing the pcmcia boot, as you suggested, but I still receive the "Operation failed" message. I think your idea about an IRQ conflict is a good one, I'll have to explore the BIOS to see if there's any way to adjust that.
Meanwhile, I'd like to extract the pertinent data from the appropriate configuration files after I boot from the cdrom and actually have the network up and running. I might be able to edit the appropriate files once I'm booted into the PCMCIA CF version of DSL, then get the card configured from there. Can you suggest which conf files I should check out, in addition to /etc/pcmcia/interfaces and /etc/resolv.conf?

Thanks again!
Doug

roberts

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Posts: 4983
Joined: Oct. 2003

Posted: April 18 2006,03:57

I would boot with the additional option of nodhcp
This will make sure that pump is not interferring.

Let machine boot up from pcmcia/CF

I would looks at System Stats and be sure no extra network modules are loaded. If so, remove them.

Then insert wireless card. Wait for beep
You can check to see it by using
$ iwconfig

It should show an unconfigured network card the its device name.

If it did not then you may have to manually insmod the module(s) that you know from running the card with liveCD.

Check again with iwconfig. If you see an entry then proceed to configure the card with whichever tool you used before. sid, wep, etc.

HTH

DaveJ45

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Posts: 20
Joined: May 2006

Posted: May 09 2006,04:15

This might be a little off topic, but this seems to be the most likely place to ask, since everyone on this topic is 'all about' booting from PCMCIA hard drives with a boot floppy.

I have about 3 small lappys of various types, all of which I would like to up with DSL permanent HD installs.

One has already been set up with a 'non-frugal' HD install.
I have a small DOS partition, a LINUX Swap partition, and the balance of the hard drive for DSL. I use GRUB, and can boot into DSL or DOS. The first one was easy, it has a bootable CD-Rom.

The other 2 machines only have floppies and hard drives. One has an expansion port which will supports SCSI devices, and I do have an SCSI cd-drive/hard drive unit for this machine.

I do have a PCMCIA ATA hard drive, and all three machines have PCMCIA slots that can accept this drive.

How would I go about putting the required data needed on the PCMCIA drive, and then use this drive to configure the machines without bootable CDs, to do a permanent DSL install on these machines, and, what steps would I use to accomplish this?

DaveJ45

19 replies since Mar. 02 2006,18:20

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