Re: Installing Debain on an PCMCIA drive?

[Heather <star@starshine.org>]

[Charset iso-8859-1 unsupported, filtering to ASCII...]
> Hi!
> 
> I helping a friend to install Debian on an Omnibook 600C. The problem is
> that it dosen't have a disk drive nither a CDROM and the disk is a PCMCIA. 
 
My husband has a 600C.  (He also has an 800... I'll explain in a moment...)

It's a PCMCIA form factor but you don't have to worry about that - it's just
a "normal" hard disk as far as can be told once it's plugged in.

(now here's the part where I don't recall, 'cuz it's not my own box) I think
it might act like SCSI inside - that'd mean it's /dev/sda.

> What I want to knew is how I do to install and prepare disk at a mount point
> for example /mnt/install. Can I take for example base.tar.gz and untar it to
> /mnt/install or how do I do. And after that how do I to write a MBR to that
> disk and make shure that it vill boot when I put it in the Omnibook. The
> Omnibook boots on the PCMCIA disk. My gool is to install base and modules so
> I can do the rest of the installation from there.

Once the disk is available on any interface (sda for scsi drive 1, hda for ide
drive 1) you can treat it like a normal disk.  If you are temporarily mounting
the drive on another system, you should
	partition the card-drive
	mount the card-drive's partitions according to your mountpoint plans
	untar debian base into it
	put a kernel and its modules in there :)
	chroot into the mountpoint that will be / later
	fix and/or create /etc/fstab to match
	fix and/or create /etc/lilo.conf
	/sbin/lilo
	exit the chroot environment.
 
As for your *real* PCMCIA bay - and in fact if you're talking about a PCMCIA slot
disk e.g. SanDisk, for use after you're booted up ... it's hopeless.

You have the only model of laptop I know of that is unlikely ever to see support
for its PCMCIA chipset under linux.  HP used something weird and *completely*
proprietary.  Their response to complaints was (wisely, imho) to switch to a more
conventional chipset.  The specs for the 600's chipset for pcmcia remains 
unavailable, and a 600 is a rare enough machine that effort to beat it down has
been spent elsewhere instead.

But as far as form factor goes, nice box.  That's why Jim got himself an Omnibook
800 later.  He occasionally expresses annoyance that what they now call omnibooks
do not have the same light, rounded form factor, nor the mouse-on-a-stick, which
is handy on airlines.

Best of luck 

* Heather Stern * star@ many places...