Installing on a Compact Flash card.
Hello,
I have an older laptop that has been working rather well, until the hard
drive started making horrible noises that is. So I backed up the hard
drive and was going to replace it with something much newer. I only
found drives way bigger and more expensive then I actually need in this
little laptop.
After thinking about it, the hard drive is the loudest and warmest part
of the laptop. So why not replace it with a Compact Flash card?
So I did.
I bought a CF-IDE adapter [1] and a CF card [2]. I found several places
online that mentioned that these products work together well and are
able to be used at the boot device.
I switched out the drives and the BIOS saw the larger hard drive (Yes
8GB is larger; I don't need much in this laptop:-). I proceeded to
install Etch (floppy net-install). It was as smooth of an install as I
have ever done. Rebooted after install and "no bootable device found".
Huh.
I booted off of my super-grub-boot-disc floppy; it found the hard drive
and the install. Once booted, the laptop ran great. It is dead silent,
it is much snappier, lighter, and cooler. Love the improvement.
I regenerated grub and saw no error. It saw the partition and everything
with no errors standing out to me. So I rebooted. Same thing; "no
bootable device found". Booting off of the grub floppy again got me back
into the install. So I dist-upgraded to Lenny. I thought maybe I hit a
bug or something and the newer grub would fix it. Nope.
I thought maybe it didn't like the fact that I have a single 8GB ext2 /
partition. Maybe I need a ~256MB /boot partition like some of the
computers back-in-the-day needed? However, the old install was only a
single 6GB ext3 / partition; there was no separate /boot partition on
it.
So now I am a bit confused. I am not sure what I am doing wrong. Can any
one advice me on what to try next? Should I try to reinstall with a
/boot partition and a / partition? Is there something I need to do for
the CF card?
[1] http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812186050
[2] http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820208340
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks!
~Stack~
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