Trying to install any OS on PC without HD (only CF card)

[Fatherof3]

In sitting room/kitchen behind flatscreen on the wall
is this small PC: Via, 800 mhz, 2gb CFcard with IDE adapter, 512 mb ram.
Bios recognises it as primary master.

1° WinXP Pro: install loads into ram and stops, advising me to check my HD.
2° Ubuntu: ditto
3° WinXP FLP: ditto
4° Win2k: "successfully" installs, refuses to boot, saying something about first sector.
5° Win98se: success. If I manage to configure it to my needs (I'll open another thread
for that) - I'll stick to it.

Actually I was hoping either 4°, Linux or 3° (in this order )would work on this slow machine.

Perhaps someone has an idea?

 

[xSauronx]

try damn small linux or puppy linux

 

[nweaver]

I haven't tried with Ubuntu, but I would think you would just need to do some tweaking of modules and grub.

 

[Noema]

DSL should work very well.

 

[Nothinman]

I haven't tried with Ubuntu, but I would think you would just need to do some tweaking of modules and grub.

Depends on how the CF card is presented to the OS, if it shows up as USB you might need to add a delay to the initramfs since USB device scanning is slow but if it shows up as IDE it should "just work".

I know XP and Vista both check to make sure you're not trying to install onto a removable drive and if so they refuse to continue. You might be able to work around that with something like BartPE though.

 

[Brazen]

I Believe DSL officially supports installing on flash storage.

 

[Nothinman]

I Believe DSL officially supports installing on flash storage.

The medium itself is irrelevant, flash on an IDE adapter should work with any OS, problems only show up on USB because of how crappy USB is and how the device scanning is asynchronous. So all offcially supporting it means is that they have a little chunk of code in their initramfs scripts that waits for either a specific amount of time or some sort of sign that USB is done scanning for devices.

 

[Noema]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
I know XP and Vista both check to make sure you're not trying to install onto a removable drive and if so they refuse to continue. You might be able to work around that with something like BartPE though.

This reminds me that like a year ago I stumbled upon a tutorial that supposedly allows you to bypass this limitation to run XP from an USB storage device...basically it involves creating a special Windows image via nLite that includes some hacks.

I must confess, though I was intrigued by it, I've never tried it myself...but it might be what the OS is looking for.

The tutorial can be found Here

 

[drag]

I run my server, which is Debian Etch, onto a flash drive.

What I did was used DD to create a image of the flash drive. I then used Qemu to install Debian onto that image, then I used DD again to write that image back to the flash drive.

I made sure to stick a file system label into and used that in /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst to reference which partition to use to as root.

Worked like a charm.

This was a USB flash drive.

 

[Fatherof3]

Thanks guys
I might be out of my depth here
but I'll be working through your suggestions
at my own pace.

 

[dwcal]

The problem sounds like the boot loader is confused about the disk geometry and can't load the OS. I haven't tried installing a regular hard-disk based OS on a CF-IDE before, but you can try messing with the LBA settings in the BIOS.

I actually have one of these CF-IDE adapters too, and I installed SLAX no problem on a 256MB CF card. So SLAX or a SLAX-derivative like Wolvix should work. Try slax.org and wolvix.org.

 

[imported_Equinox]

Is this a PCMCIA CF->IDE? I had an issue with a laptop trying to boot Knoppix off the CD and it wouldn't work until I used acpi=off. Don't know how you would work that command in with Ubuntu, but I'd think since it is also a Debian derivative this might work. It did the same sort of thing, freeze randomly after getting halfway through an attempt to boot until I used that command. Perhaps the Debian gurus might be able to provide more information. I don't know how to utilize that sort of command switch under normal Debian (non-Knoppix related) circumstances.