Want to boot from CF Card.

[adric22]

Okay.. I don't know if anyone has done this before, but I don't think it is too difficult.

I am building a noiseless, low-power workstation. I bought one of those Compact-Flash to IDE converters. However, I only have a 16 MB CF card at the moment. At some future time, I may buy a large one. But since I have a USB 2.0 PCI card inside the computer which has an internal USB connector, I thought this would be perfect for attaching a large-capacity USB Flash drive. The USB drives seem to be much cheaper than a comparible CF card. Only trouble with this configuration is that I still can't boot directly from the USB drive as the BIOS on this 1.0Ghz system doesn't support it.

So my goal is to boot the vmlinuz and initrd.gz from the CF card and have the PUP215 file be loaded from the USB drive.

I have checked out the wakepup disk. This actually works, and I know I could format the drive with DOS and transplant this stuff over to the CF. but I think it would boot tremendously faster if the linux kernal is booted directly on the CF without loading DOS first.

Only trouble is.. I am not sure how to setup a bootable linux kernal on a 16 MB drive and what lines I need to add into the bootloader to tell it where to find the initrd and where to find the pup215 file. Any help on this would be appriciated. I guess if nobody knows, I will eventually just go buy a larger CF card.

[veronicathecow]

Hi, if you are doing it for fun, then go ahead, otherwise, probably not a huge outlay to buy a 256 CF.All the best
Tony

[bobn9lvu]

You can pick up 1G CF cards for aprox $20 OVERPRICED now a days...
I just picked up a pair from OfficeMax for $19.95 each, they work great
with the $4.99 adapter from Ebay..

Bob

[bostonvaulter]

I believe there is an option in the universal installer to install to a idehd CF card type thing.

[BlackAdder]

Forum users pakt and raffy have posted on a number of topics about thin client and similar systems which boot from CF in an IDE adapter (machines such as those from Ewayco and NTAVO). pakt also created a floppy disk that can get you started in most cases if your machine will not boot from USB. But including a floppy drive is probably not what you really want to do these days.
I agree that unless you are really strapped for cash it would be better to get a bigger CF card and use it to boot and then use it or USB for data storage.

[raffy]

Just remember the best format for the CF is still FAT16, which I guess is limited to 4 GB partition only (single partition).

[rcrsn51]

You should be able to boot Puppy with your combination of small CF card and large flash drive. First, check out this page. It describes various methods of booting Puppy with GRUB.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=16950

Here are the basic steps:

1. Move your CF-IDE setup to a working machine.
2. Install GRUB on its boot record.
3. Make a menu.lst entry using PMEDIA=usbflash
4. Also put vmlinuz and initrd.gz on the CF
5. Put the sfs files on the flash drive.
6. Replace the CF card in the target machine and reboot.

When the machine boots off the CF, it should load the kernel. Then Puppy's hardware detection should take over to find the other files on the flash drive.

Let us know how it works out.