Problem booting new CF card

[Jeff Vian]

On Mon, 2006-09-11 at 12:50 -0600, Phil Meyer wrote:
> 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 ...
> >>
> >> -- 
> >> fedora-list mailing list
> >> fedora-list at redhat.com
> >> To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
> >>
> >
> > 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. :(
> 
Ok, the MBR and grub are loaded. That is a first step.

Is the partition table consistent with Linux?   I have seen a lot of
drives partitioned by Windows that are not on the cylinder boundaries
when booted with Linux. Maybe that card has the same problem.