OK I am back with you. I managed to write another bootable CF card after having some problems with the first one I tried.
The 'working' one is a Sandisk 512Mb that's never been reformatted - ie. it has always been FAT16. I was using it in my camera.
The one I 'wanted to use' started life as a camera card, then has been formatted with ext3, had partitions erased & rewritten, ext3/FAT16, the lot. I tried to create a FAT filesystem after correctly partitioning the card by using 'mkdosfs' ... it returned quickly and silently - I could not prove that it had worked.
The Puppy Installer couldn't seem to handle this card - it gave the following messages (in the orange window):
/mnt/data is /dev/root
Cannot open device /dev/root
:
umount: /mnt/data : Invalid argument
I kind of hoped the Puppy Installer would handle a card either (a) with a blank partition table, (b) an ext3 partition already. It looks like I fell outside the comfort zone of the Installer! Thus the only hint I can give others is to use a FAT16-formatted card, and ensure that it really *is* formatted. The grafpup mkdosfs may not work for you. Like, use it in your camera first.
There were also problems with the sdxxx descriptors as I noted in previous posts. That was with the new iso, booted from CD, on the machine I used to write the CF card. There I was using a multi-port USB card reader, and I also have a no-name plug-in reader. They may well differ in how they appear to Linux.
Like I said, success was eventually obtained with a FAT16 virgin card, I told the installer to add the Mbr from Syslinux. It booted in my VIA machine... I can move forward again
So, how well does the new 20070426 iso work in a via eden mobo with Sata? Pretty good! The Pmounter shows the Sata drives, one click to mount, write/read a small test file ok.
I'm concerned about trying the Puppy Installer to Sata again - I don't want to get Grub written over my 2nd CF card just yet.
Nathan - perhaps this is something that needs attention. Perhaps the PMEDIA variable is being used to find the destination for Grub. Would it be better to put Grub on the 'real destination' drive??
I've attached the dmesg output - I noted it now says 'attached sata drive' or somesuch, which is new. (Oh, I had to lie - it is a plain text file not a .gz)
Also here's the probedisk and probepart output (the ones included in the new iso - Jason's updated ones). This is running on the VIA machine, with the CF moved into the IDE bus adapter.
probedisk:
/dev/hda|disk|SanDisk SDCFB-512
/dev/sda|Direct-Access|ATA SAMSUNG SP1614C SW10
probepart:
/dev/hda1|vfat|1000880
/dev/sda1|ext3|155653722
/dev/sda2|swap|1012094
/dev/sda3|ext3|155910824
Looking good. Perhaps it's just multi-slot usb readers there is a problem with. I will soon try other probedisk/probeparts on the machine with the problematic multi-slot reader.
Great job so far
I guess next I should test preservation of Static IP setup over a reboot when using a savefile, since that was a problem earlier on.
Cheers,
Simon.