Puppy2 pcmcia boot does not work

[tim]

Hi, I have been using puppy for some time on my Sony Vaio laptop and just tried version 2 which does not run from the cd drive which is attached by a pcmcia card. all versions from 1.01 to 1.08 all work well, any chance this could be fixed in the future? - i can supply more details if that helps, but i notice pcmcia is on the to do list.
I did try DSL and Knoppix out of interest, and neither of those would boot from the cd rom...........
Many thanks for an excellent distribution!
Tim

[Sit Heel Speak]

You may find the answer in pakt's recent threads in the Cutting Edge section of this forum and in the Announcements and Bugs sections of the Puppy 2 Developer forum, for example

http://www.puppyos.com/nfphpbb/viewtopic.php?t=345
http://www.puppyos.com/nfphpbb/viewtopic.php?t=365

and his threads concerning PCMCIA booting.

I am not sure what your proper PMEDIA= setting is.

Tell us what method you are booting by. Also, is the hard disk formatted NTFS or FAT32, i.e. WinXP or Win9X?

[tim]

Hi, thanks for the reply, i did check the links but i think this is simply that the pcmcia drivers/cardmanager? are not loaded early in the boot process - it initialy boots up - i get to choose the boot options and off it goes - it seems all the usb stuff loads and then i get - error- cannot find puppy on idecd boot media, pupmode =1 - and then- kernel panic- not syncing attempted to kill init.
The cd drive is connected via a pcmcia card and is hde in pup1.08. I have dedicated my old sony vaio to puppy and formatted the drive to ext2. Works great!
Thanks
Tim

[Sit Heel Speak]

Hmm. Well, booting Puppy 2.01 off a USB stick through a USB 2 PCMCIA adapter did not work for me until I substituted pakt's initrd.gz for the initrd.gz which is supplied with Puppy 2.01. And I was getting the exact same error previously as you are. Try the new initrd.gz on your boot CD and see if it makes a difference. It's at

http://www.puppyos.com/nfphpbb/viewtopic.php?t=345

but hurry up and download it, as that forum is going down soon...

[Rudy]

[quote]I did try DSL and Knoppix out of interest, and neither of those would boot from the cd rom...........[/quote]


Hi Tim,

The magic word to boot Knoppix and its derivates in this case is a boot parameter:

"ide2=0x180 nopcmcia". (yes, nopcmcia...)

I do not know why, found this a long time ago in a forum...

It also lets you boot lots of other distros like GENTOO, Slackware, etc... from the VAIO external PCMCIA CD-ROM.

It will not work with Puppy 2.x (so far)...

Hope it helps.
Rudy

[nicsheen]

Using ide1=0x180 nopcmcia

(Note ide1 not 2 as mentioned in previous post)
worked for me on a PCG N505X

Nic

[pakt]

Barry has added the boot option 'pfix=usbcard' to Puppy 2.02, so you don't need a special version of initrd.gz any more.

Please see the new wkpup2x v0.2 thread for using the boot option: http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?t=9962

Paul