[mythtv-users] CF card adapter Hard Drive

Andre mythtv-list at dinkum.org.uk
Wed Sep 8 22:21:37 UTC 2010


On 8 Sep 2010, at 22:16, Tortise wrote:

> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Andre" <mythtv-list at dinkum.org.uk>
> To: "Discussion about MythTV" <mythtv-users at mythtv.org>
> Sent: Thursday, September 09, 2010 8:55 AM
> Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] CF card adapter Hard Drive
> 
> 
> 
>> I have an IDE to CF adaptor but I discovered that not all CF cards can be made bootable, the only one I have that's bootable is 8MB, barely big enough for a modern kernel and guaranteed bootable CF cards are rather expensive.
> 
> I thought all CF drives can be made to boot as they are mere passive devices storing data, including boot files.  Not all CF adapters are bootable though, although I think most are.

That's what I thought, I know my adaptor can boot because I pulled it out of an old firewall machine which had the whole system on an 8MB CF. It will boot with a 1GB CF I have but that's very small and also very slow, the 4GB 133x CF I have doesn't boot but seems entirely readable once the system is booted from CD or HDD. Very odd as the adaptor is entirely passive, maybe there is some PC bios mode issue, I thought I had it working with the bios forced to PIO4 and no DMA but although the install seemed to go ok it didn't boot.

Strangely Amazon paired the same Kingston Elite Pro 133x card I have with the Startech adaptor, I guess they don't know any better either.

In my research I discovered that regular Sandisk CF cards (not the industrial system disk cards) need some internal status bit toggled before they can be booted from, there's some utility they will only give you after signing an NDA, seems a bit extreme!

Maybe I'll boot from the USB stick but keep the majority of files on the CF or boot off the 1GB and use nfs for everything else, this motherboard doesn't like a full netboot, tried that, the Ethernet card seems to need some initialisation before it negotiates, another MB here works fine but I didn't want to use an i7 for a myth frontend ;-)

Just for the record in case it's useful to someone; MythBuntu 10.04 as a frontend and slave backend with two DVBS2 cards wants about 3.1GB, that's .23 fixes from JYA's repo with the Nvidia-glx-256 drivers.

Andre



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