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Home / Other I-Appliances / MSN Companion Out of ideas IA_1 boot woes

Out of ideas (modified 0 times) GaTk Profile I would appreciate some ( a lot!) of help in getting my IA_1 to boot. My enviornment is: Test machine w/WIN98 SE on hardrive C (no other hard drives) LEXAR 128mb compact flash card flash reader/writer CR-V7-UC part244 Partition Manager IA_1 with bios reset (F10 brings up the bios screens) I have followed several "howto's".... the last being the one from Yuan's site. When I set the MBR to Normal IPL, my IA_1 goes thru the power up sequence, the COMPAQ logo disappears, and the blinking cursor sits permanently in the top left corner of the display. Doing a complete re-format, sys, activation with the MBR set to use a boot manager gives different results. On power up, when the COMPAQ logo disappears, I get a line that says "booting HD1/2 Error!" followed by a line that says "booting HD1/". Keying a 2 after the slash repeats the first message. These messages lead me to believe that my flash card is being WRITTEN by my writer and the flash card is being READ by the IA_1 I've tried many different combinations of format and system transfer. (wiped out the MBR on my hard disk 2 or 3 times!) I'm out of ideas and I sure hate to admit the machine is winning. Lookig for ideas and/or suggestions.... EBAY is unacceptable... Is there anyone in the Atlanta area willing to let me bring my IA_1 to your site and let me try to boot with a known working card???? Thanks gatk in Atlanta 08-09-2004 17:59:30

RE:Out of ideas (modified 0 times) radarman Profile I never had a lot of luck with the USB CF readers, so I use a CF to IDE/ATA adapter, and plug the module directly into the PC as a drive. The adapters are fairly cheap, and really only have one downside - you can't hotswap them. I have never had a problem making a bootable image using mine. (They are also great for extremely small form factor machines, and VIA has started putting CF slots on some of their boards already) Also, and perhaps equally important, some CF cards don't have a proper boot sector, as the manufacturer probably never intended them to be used as an ATA device - and certainly not as a bootable device. You might check around, and find out which CF cards support bootable ATA mode. (Most do, but a few don't) If yours doesn't, you can fdisk /mbr all day, and it won't do a thing. -radarman 08-10-2004 10:50:52

RE:Out of ideas (modified 0 times) chillywilly Profile Hello, Are you trying to boot from the sandisk or the CF? It's been a while since I played with the Compaq IA but I believe you have to set booting to the CF and disable booting from the sandisk. If you are planning on installing Midori on the CF you will have to make some changes to a file because the images after they are installed are meant to be copied to the sandisk and will boot off the sandisk only. if you look at the thread "Midori - internal or Compact Flash" in the MSN Companion section there are instructions on how to do this. I followed the instructions from the Yuan site and they worked flawlessly. thanks and good luck. Chillywilly 08-11-2004 11:38:33

RE:Out of ideas (modified 0 times) GaTk Profile ChillyWilly.... I believe you have done it.... I was about to post a pre-written post in which I was going to say "there appears to be something fundamentally different about images that won't boot and ElDorito"... The boot sector of those images does not have any of that LINUX stuff... SYSLINK...VMLINUZ etc. I have flashed the internal SanDisk on my IA-1 with ElDorito and it boots and runs.... My knowledge of LINUX is limited to spelling it !! but here goes ... If I put one of those "unbootable" images on my CF card and boot ElDorito from the internal SANDISK, when ELDorito stops at the boot prompt, can I key in boot parameters that will boot an image from my CF disk ?? BTW.. I have never been successful booting to a DOS prompt from my CF card... ----- I knew there was something different about those images ---- Ted in Atlanta 08-11-2004 14:29:32

RE:Out of ideas (modified 0 times) GaTk Profile Is there a LINUX program or command available in ElDorito that will duplicate what Dolly does? I'm still struggling and have made no progress. ChillyWilly gave me hope with the news that the images available are hardwired to run off the internal SanDisk. Using my unvast Linux knowledge I made a loadable CF disk with ElDorito in the bootable partition and the other images in a second partition. When booted, Eldorito (hdc1) could see the images on hdc5 on the CF disk and also the 2 internal Sandisk partitions at hda1 & hda2.Using Eldorito and the dd command I copied an image to the internal Sandisk, FDISK showed the hda1 device as "bootable". I shutdown and re-booted, pausing to change the bootorder to boot the internal disk first. I did this with all the images, including ElDorito and a DOS 6.22 boot disk. No joy period !! Conclusion..... the Linux dd command does not write an image the same way the DOS Dolly program does...still looking for ideas. No joy in Atlanta  08-14-2004 06:58:29

RE:Out of ideas (modified 0 times) GaTk Profile Is there a LINUX program or command available in ElDorito that will duplicate what Dolly does? I'm still struggling and have made no progress. ChillyWilly gave me hope with the news that the images available are hardwired to run off the internal SanDisk. Using my unvast Linux knowledge I made a loadable CF disk with ElDorito in the bootable partition and the other images in a second partition. When booted, Eldorito (hdc1) could see the images on hdc5 on the CF disk and also the 2 internal Sandisk partitions at hda1 & hda2.Using Eldorito and the dd command I copied an image to the internal Sandisk, FDISK showed the hda1 device as "bootable". I shutdown and re-booted, pausing to change the bootorder to boot the internal disk first. I did this with all the images, including ElDorito and a DOS 6.22 boot disk. No joy period !! Conclusion..... the Linux dd command does not write an image the same way the DOS Dolly program does...still looking for ideas. No joy in Atlanta  08-14-2004 06:59:09

RE:Out of ideas (modified 0 times) GaTk Profile Am still having fun trying to hack my IA-1. Since the last episode I've made some progress... especially with the tools that are available. I have a bootable CF card that has 4 partitions plus a boot manager. P1 has eldorito, P2 has a DOS 6_2_2 image, P3 is a Midori and P4 has a M41 image, P2 thru P4 were loaded with DOLLY on my WIN98 machine. P1 was loaded with DSKPROBE on my XP Pro machine. The CF card in my IA-1 boots to the boot manager from where I can boot the eldorito from P1. The eldorito runs fine and I can do all the LINUX things to the CF card as well as the internal SANDISK, I can dd the eldorita image to the SANDISK and it will boot and run fine. Yhe DOS image will not boot from either source. Using LS -a shows all of the reqired files are there. Copying the other images to the SANDISK results in boot failures as well. All ofthis is familiar from days long gone when I attempted to hack a big disk into a friends TIVO... struggled for weeks and finally stumbled on the 1 little thing that made it work. There has to be something I'm missing. Willing to try any suggestions except sell it !!! Thanks from Atlanta 08-20-2004 08:05:08

RE:Out of ideas changed to SUCESS!! (modified 0 times) GaTk Profile Success is indeed the reward of persistence.... I have loaded and looked at Midori_3 and M41... finally!!! Still can't load DOS but now I don't need it !! I stumbled on success FWIW as follows. I loaded Eltorito on the Sandisk and was looking around... forgot I had booted from the SANDISK and did a dd from HDC1 to HDA with the M41 (at least the 50th time) Re-booted the system and M41 scared me when the music came on. I don't know why this works,,,, never would have knowingly overlaid a partition that was active... Love my new toy !!! Next stop the InterNet via dial up... Joy in Atlanta tk 08-21-2004 17:46:04

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