Re: Unable to boot into CompactFlash card - card not found by initrd
On 20/01/12 20:59, Michael Lange wrote:
> Thus spoketh Scott Ferguson <prettyfly.productions@gmail.com>
> unto us on Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:47:38 +1100:
>
>> On 20/01/12 20:19, Michael Lange wrote:
> (...)
<snipped>
>>
>
> That is interesting, I didn't know that, but how does grub then know about
> the device when the BIOS doesn't?
In general it doesn't - it either uses devicemap, or it's own biosdisk
module to generate a devicemap on the fly. But it (GRUB2) is very
powerful, and extendible (and scriptable).
>
> Regards
>
> Michael
>
<snipped>
Your laptop [*1] doesn't appear to have BIOS support for booting from
the CF card.
Having had the time to do a little Googling (about 10 minutes) there are
three possible routes (maybe more).
1. Boot from GRUB installed on hdd, using kernel and initrd copied from
CF card install. Known to work[*2]
2. Boot from GRUB installed on the hdd, using kernel and initrd on the
CF card. Should be possible.[*3]
3. Boot from GRUB installed on the hdd, using plopkexec[*4] to boot the
kernel and initrd on the CF card. 'Might'[*5] be possible.
[*1]"Dell Latitude" X1 A.K.A. "Samsung Q30".
I don't have access to this device, and haven't taken the time to check,
so I'm guessing about the lack of BIOS support for booting from the CF
card. These things can be less than obvious - Windoof can mark a CF card
RO which can render it unbootable, some BIOS require USB legacy keyboard
support enabled before being able to boot USB devices - some PCMIA buses
use 16-bit drivers which would possibly require GRUB to use Linux16.
Have you checked for BIOS updates?
[*2]http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=34290&sid=524430a36bb34681698429cdd8f16b0c
[*3]From the GRUB cli, what is the output from:-
grub> ls
What is the output from:-
grub> lspci
If you get nothing, or an error, try again after running:-
grub> insmod lspci
What is the output from:-
grub> lsmod
If you get nothing, or an error, try again after running:-
grub> insmod lsmod
[*4]http://www.plop.at/en/plopkexec.html
[*5]If your CF card uses an USB bus instead of PCMCIA.
Cheers
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