Problem booting new CF card

[Jim Cornette]

> 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 ...


I have used various CF cards and some such as SanDisk seem to need 
ide-nodma added to the grub stanza in order to boot. Otherwise, you get 
a lockup as you are experiencing. Some brands boot alright with no 
stanza added to grub.

Jim

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