CF adapter testing time ... UPS dropped off my Ampro CompactFlash to IDE adapter http://www.ampro.com/products/accessoryhw/cfa.htm First, the good news: 1) The microdrive fits in the CF socket! Apparently this is a 5mm high CF+ (type II) socket, not the type I like on the PCM-5822 motherboard. This is the socket that should be on the PCM-5822 ... 2) The cable is 44-pin so it fits the PCM-5822 with no hacking required, and provides power from the motherboard (unlike the TAPR and VME adapters which are 40-pin IDE and have separate power lead. 3) The CF socket has a clip to hold the microdrive in the socket. Cool, it looks like this clip can be moved to the PCM-5822. 4) The CF socket has a jumper to set the drive as master or slave. 5) The adapter IDE cable has two 44-pin IDE sockets so I can attach both laptop HDD and microdrive on the primary IDE channel. 6) The two IDE sockets on the adapter cable are close together and it appears that they are set up to use two CF adapters side by side. If a second CF adapter was used, they would be laid out next closely next to each other. Now for the bad news: I haven't been able to boot the microdrive from this adapter! I did a complete install of slackware from scrath using the adapter and everything worked fine. The BIOS sees the microdrive, linux sees the drive, I was able to fdisk, mke2fs, and run the entire setup program. But when I reboot I get the message: VFS: Cannot open root device 16:01 Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 16:01 This message happens right after the partition check, this may be where it is failing. Strangeness: 1) I CAN boot this drive if I use the slackware lilo boot floppy specifying mount root=/dev/hda2 2) Lilo installs fine, and yes I remembered to run lilo after making changes. Since I was able to boot from floppy I tried some different lilo configurations. All yielded the kernel panic. My lilo.conf file looks like this: boot=/dev/hda map=/boot/map install=/boot/boot.b default=linux image=/vmlinuz label=linux read-only root=/dev/hda2 3) It's wierd, but the microdrive can be auto detected in BIOS using the IDE adapter cable but NOT when the drive is in the CF socket, yet it boots okay from CF but not IDE. 4) In ALL cases I get DMA timeouts during the partition check. When booting from the CF socket it times out three times, then proceeds. When booting from the IDE adapter it times out three times then fails with the kernel panic. Anybody have any idea what the problem might be or what else I should try to remedy this? At first I though maybe the BIOS settings (PIO modes & DMA) were not correct, but the BIOS autodetects these fine with the drive in the IDE adapter. -- Doug Grow your own Wearables http://wearables.los-gatos.net/ What I want is for you to call me and my jacket answers -- Subscription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" toWear-Hard Mailing List Archive (searchable): http://wearables.blu.org please, Please, *PLEASE* don't subscribe through a forward/false domain
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