Re: Unable to boot into CompactFlash card - card not found by initrd
Hi,
Thus spoketh Scott Ferguson <prettyfly.productions@gmail.com>
unto us on Sun, 22 Jan 2012 18:03:25 +1100:
(...)
>
> 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]
That is what I am trying, however when the kernel tries to mount the root
file system, it is unable to find the CF card. And this is the part which
I cannot believe that it can't be fixed.
I still believe that it might have to do with the CF card being marked as
"removable" and the way udev handles these devices, however I don't have a
"fixed" card at hand to verify this. In fact I am not even sure that it is
"removable"; thunar shows it as removable device, however udevadm info
says ATTR{removable}=="0" . Hmmm...
> 2. Boot from GRUB installed on the hdd, using kernel and initrd on the
> CF card. Should be possible.[*3]
Does not work, because grub does not find the CF card.
> 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.
The CF slot is actualy pcmcia, not USB.
>
> [*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?
Yes, the latest BIOS is installed.
>
> [*2]
> http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=34290&sid=524430a36bb34681698429cdd8f16b0c
This looks interesting, I will have a closer look at it and see if there
is something I can try, one of these days. At a quick glance it looks
like they needed to patch the initrd's init script, maybe I could try to
adapt this.
>
> [*3]From the GRUB cli, what is the output from:-
> grub> ls
Shows the internal HDD's partitions.
>
> What is the output from:-
> grub> lspci
Basically the same as when being called from the running system, except
that the "SD Host Controller" appears as "System Hardware".
> What is the output from:-
> grub> lsmod
More than fits on the screen, is there something particular I should look
for?
Thanks and regards
Michael
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