Trouble booting CF card in PCMCIA port from GRUB2

Trouble booting CF card in PCMCIA port from GRUB2

[Stephan Henningsen]

Hi,

My goal is to make my old laptop boot a live Linux dist from the CF card
inserted into an adapter in the PCMCIA port.  After booting a GRUB2
image, the laptop's hard disk drive can be put to sleep and I'll have a
 silent netbook.

I'm experimenting with this rather simple problem, but on a somewhat
strange setup.  Please don't bother suggesting a different setup, unless
it is absolutely necessary and conforms to my requirements mentioned below

Surely this experiment can be reproduced with just one laptop, but I'm
using two.  My normal (host) laptop runs Ubuntu 8.10 and is used for
everyday usage, including compiling.  My old (target) laptop has no
cdrom drive, no floppy drive, no working USB flash or PCMCIA CF boot
support from BIOS, is running an old and obsolete Ubuntu.  Still, both
laptops work, and while experimenting I don't want to replace their
existing legacy GRUB replaced by GRUB2 or otherwise contaminate them
with experimental files.



On the host laptop I've built a svn checkout of GRUB2 and installed it
into an isolated directory under /opt:

mkdir -p /opt/grub2
cd /opt/grub2
svn co svn://svn.sv.gnu.org/grub/trunk/grub2 ./src
cd src
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/opt/grub
make  &&  make install

This is not important for this issue, but included for completeness: I
have this weird/magic opt-setup that automatically sets up the proper
paths it /opt to something like this:

export PATH=$PATH:/opt/grub2/sbin:/opt/grub2/bin
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/opt/grub2/lib
export MANPATH=$MANPATH:/opt/grub2/share/man



I've build a GRUB2 image on the host for the target.  Keeping things in
one single image file helps to keep things simple and reduces the number
of files to manage to a minimum:

/opt/grub2/bin/grub-mkimage -o grub2.img \
	pc ata ext2 linux \
	normal help minicmd ls cat search tar memdisk



Then I copied the grub2.imb to the target laptop's /boot/ dir.  I added
this entry in the /boot/grub/menu.lst of the legacy GRUB:

title	GRUB2 Image
root	(hd0,0)
kernel	/boot/grub2.img


When I boot the target laptop, it first hits legacy GRUB.  Here I select
to boot the "GRUB2 Image", and now I have the "grub>" prompt of GRUB2.

grub> ls
(ata0) (ata0,1) (ata0,2) (ata0,3)

As you see, only ata0 is shown, which is the target laptop's harddrive.
 The PCMCIA slot or the card in it isn't shown!



Am I doing something wrong?  Is this a known issue?  What now?  I'd like
to help if I can =)


-- 
Stephan

Re: Trouble booting CF card in PCMCIA port from GRUB2

[ebik]

On Mon, 20 Apr 2009 23:58:37 +0200
Stephan Henningsen <stephan-grub2@asklandd.dk> wrote:

>[...]
> no working USB flash or PCMCIA CF boot support from BIOS,
>[...]
> The PCMCIA slot or the card in it isn't shown!

This coincides, the PCMCIA slot can be shown only if BIOS has support
for it, because AFAIK grub2 does not (yet?) include PCMCIA drivers.

Maybe using linux+kexec as bootloader may help you.

-- 
                                 Tomáš 'ebík' Ebenlendr
                                 http://get.to/ebik
                                 PF 2009.30503599061

Re: Trouble booting CF card in PCMCIA port from GRUB2

[Urja Rannikko]

Hi,

> grub> ls
> (ata0) (ata0,1) (ata0,2) (ata0,3)
>
> As you see, only ata0 is shown, which is the target laptop's harddrive.
>  The PCMCIA slot or the card in it isn't shown!

The problem is that grub2 would need a driver for the PCMCIA host
controller - that would enable the PCMCIA CF-card to be seen by the
ata driver (AFAIK).
I'm thinking that you have 3 options:
- boy a laptop IDE<->CF adapter and put the CF card to where the
laptop's main hard disk is (install grub2 on the CF)
- use linux+kexec (as already said)
- or wait for somebody to write (or write it yourself) a PCMCIA
subsystem for grub2