Problem booting new CF card

[Phil Meyer]

Tod Merley wrote:
> On 9/10/06, Phil Meyer <pmeyer at themeyerfarm.com> wrote:
>> For temperature, silence, and other conditions, a Compact Flash card is
>> often used with mini-ATX boards to boot the OS and run the apps from.
>>
>> On these types of motherboards, the CF card shows up as /dev/hdc
>> (typically).
>>
>> A recent purchase of CF cards however, have been problematic.
>> Kingston elite pro 2GB 50X CF/2GB-S
>>
>> These cards are visible and usable to a desktop system running FC5.  No
>> problem there.  Partitioning, mkfs, and data transfers all were normal
>> on the desktop box using a USB based card reader.
>>
>> However, when placed in a system as /dev/hdc and booted, the system
>> hangs when it first tries to read the partition table from the drive.
>> Normal operation prints an indented line with the partitions it finds
>> just after it prints the drive parameters.  ie:
>>  hdc: hdc1, hdc2, hdc3
>>
>> With these cards, we get:
>>  hdc:
>>
>> And the system is hard hung.  This has been tried with the original and
>> respin boot CDs.
>>
>> The fly in the ointment?  KNOPPIX 2.6 kernels boot just fine.  And no,
>> this project cannot easily migrate to KNOPPIX. :)
>>
>> What am I missing?  Other CF cards this size have worked in the past.
>> An old working CF card was booted in this system just to make sure that
>> the problem is with the new cards.
>>
>> Stumped ...
>>
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>>
>
> Hi Phil Meyer!
>
> My first guess is that you are not forming the MBR of the CF card in
> any way that will make it a boot device.
>
> Good Hunting!
>
> Tod
>
Inserted CF onto a desktop system, mounted first partition, copied over 
/boot to it, ran grub-install on it.

Mounted CF card into small mini-ITX server, boot from CF get GRUB disk 
error.  Ok MBR is set.  Boot from FC5 boot CD, won't get passed the IDE 
checks. :(