HD Install :: Assistance in setting up CF card

I am looking for some assistance in setting up DSL on CF.

My problem is firstly that I know just enough to be dangerous and little else, secondly my development environment is different to target device.

I am needing to set up a CF which will run as secondary master on secondary ide on an embedded pc running at 300MHz and with 128MB Ram (pretty neat).

On my development machine (A normal desktop PC) I am using a usb CF card reader and am booting off the live dsl cd - the system sees the CF card as /dev/sda

I first tried to just do a hd install (seeing as CF is meant to emulate hd on ide) but errors were pretty numerous (and didn't spend too much time).

Unfortunately it appears that frugal script only works with primary master so I can't go this route (my embedded pc only has one ide and I am unable to hook up a CD to it as well as CF - and in any case CF would be secondary master.

I then tried to setup the CF card as a USB thumbdrive but also didn't have much success. Seems to be quite a bit of traffic on this subject and maybe I just need to keep hacking away.

Is there anyone that has been through this process and is able/willing to assist.

Much appreciated!

*topic bump*This is _exactly_ the setup I am trying to get to work... did you have any success?

This is what I would do:

Keep your CF card formatted with the default (should be MSDOS FAT filesystem).

Manually copy the \KNOPPIX folder from your CDROM over to your CF drive while running MSWindows or other OS on your other computer.

Follow the FAQ instructions for creating a boot floppy disk.

Insert the CF device and boot floppy into your embedded computer.

It should find the CF device's KNOPPIX filesystem and treat it like a solid state CDROM drive.

Good Luck.

In my setup I needed to create seperate partitions on the CF card. While I was at it I created a backup restore directory as well.

One of my problems was that I couldn't format my first partition to DOS format - I didn't look to deep and assumed that this is not on distro (I only had 2 days to get demo together and ship to client) so I formatted all partitions to ext2.

In our application, we only have CF card so everything had to be self contained and booting into ramdisk suited us just fine.

I found that by modifying frugal-install I was able to get this modified script to create the image on CF card along with backup/restore and extensions directory.

So far so good.

EXT2 filesystem should also work.

Sometimes these flash devices do not like it when they are formatted in a manner that is not suggested by the manufacturer.

Since most CF cards come formatted in FAT, I would stick to FAT for my first attempt. However, EXT2 should also work.

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