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Re: Microdrive on PCM-5822

From: Doug Sutherland <>
Date: Fri, 1 Dec 2000 10:00:42 -0800

Carlos,

> I will try booting into setup (BIOS) and see if mine 
> recognizes the microdrive ...

I tried booting into PCM-5822 BIOS and selected the "auto detect HDD"
option. Mine didn't recognize the microdrive either. However, when I 
set both the primary and secondary IDE drives to "auto" it does work
with linux. Like I said before, one easy way to get linux on there is 
to do a network install. I copied the redhat linux distro onto my web 
server and created a network boot disk. When I boot from floppy the 
install program automatically finds the right realtek ethernet driver
and allows me to enter my IP address and such. Then it asks me where
the server with the distro is, and it loads the second stage install
image from there and completes the install. 

One interesting thing I noticed is that when the BIOS is set to auto 
detect the HDDs, the IBM microdrive shows up as secondary master, 
unlike my laptop drive, which shows up as primary master. But this 
doesn't affect the machine booting from microdrive when its the only 
HDD installed. 

The next step for me is to install Slackware on the microdrive. Seems
that Slackware doesn't have the HTTP network install method, but they 
do allow just copying the files onto the local HDD and running the 
setup program from there. Since I already have a linux file system 
on there (from redhat install) it should be easy to do this. I will 
play around with Slackware install methods and make a mini howto for
this. I also plan to put together a small wearable distro based on 
minimal Slackware components plus wearable stuff like emacspeak, 
and will be making that available so not everyone has to sift through
every single package and decide which to keep or toss.

If you want to verify that your microdrive works in the PCM-5822 
try creating a network boot disk (use the DD util to write the file
bootnet.img to floppy), then boot from floppy, choose HTTP install
method, and point to the redhat site. I have tried this before and 
it works but is slow. A better method is to load the distro onto 
a local web server and point to it locally. It's also possible to
install via NFS mounted machine or FTP, but I haven't tried those.

  -- Doug 

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