Boot problems with Toshiba CDROM-PCMCIA

[skaag]

...
I have verified success on my Toshiba Portege 3110ct with the external Freecom PCMCIA CD-ROM drive, using the floppies and the latest (2003-09-22) Knoppix ISO.
...

I have the same model of the Toshiba Portege 3110ct, with an external pcmcia cdrom model F-TO-TCD-24L (Says on the sticker "designed for Toshiba Portege 3110 CT").

I boot the first floppy (boot disk), and the second (pcmcia drivers) floppy, then the external cdrom lights up just fine and it starts seeking for the knoppix files. It proceeds to mount the knoppix cd and succeeds, under /cdrom. I know this because It fails at some point on module cloop.o and throws me back into the limited shell.

I'm getting really desparate with this - any ideas what to try next? I tried with and without the cheatcodes you suggested, and even tried the ide2=0x180 parameter. Nothing seems to help with the cloop.o failure.

Thanks,

Skaag

[pry3i]

i am also using the same freecom drive with a 3490ct - having problems
as well. almost as though the pcmcia drivers arent being read when i
insert the second floppy.


i cant help but wonder if it would be easier to remaster the cd with the
disks in the .img - too bad i'm a noob and have very little idea what i am
getting into.

[skaag]

Ok, I actually managed to do this and now have Knoppix installed and working perfectly on the laptop.

I followed the advice of Kano on channel #Knoppix on irc.freenode.net. Kano is in charge of the Kanotix release. His advice was to put the entire content of the cdrom onto the FAT32 partition on which Windows was running (This laptop has dual boot, Windows and Linux together). Using this technique I did not need any special boot floppies with pcmcia drivers.

When you turn on the laptop, you need to press C (for cdrom) several times, until the red Toshiba logo appears. It will then proceed to boot the regular knoppix bootable cd, but at the stage where it is looking for knoppix on the cdrom, and can not find it because it does not have the cdrom drivers, it will proceed to scan the other local partitions, and it will find the Knoppix directory from the cdrom and simply start from there!

At this point, it's just the same as with any other knoppix installation... run knoppix-installer and you'r good to go.

Good luck to you all,

Skaag

[bill21h]

I saw there were people griping about the Sony Vaio SR-33 and booting from the pcmcia cdrom drive. Try this, it works on mine.
knoppix ide2=0x180,0x386 pci=off

[Mumtaz]

So it should be possible to get this working on your Portege as well.
When the PMCIA Modules are loaded does the CDROM power LED light up ?

I just tried Luell's PCMCIA Boot Disks on my Toshiba Portege 3440ct. The LED on the PCMCIA CD drive did *not* lit after the second (PCMCIA module) disk was inserted. Instead it displayed "Can't find KNOPPIX filesystem, sorry" message and dropped me to a very limited shell.

Note that I have a USB floppy drive, and a PCMCIA CD-ROM drive. My woeful account of installation attempt with a query on this forum remains answered.

PS: I am also sending this message to Mr Luell, hoping to hear from him.

[mentat]

I've been trying to get knoppix to work with my toshiba portege 3505 for a few versions now. I've tried the "ide2=0x180 nopcmcia" with both knoppix and knoppix26. I've also tried "ide2=0x140" with and without the pcmcia because it shows that address when plugging in the pcmcia cd-rom (the toshiba pa3246U-1DVD) to an already running knoppix system. The problem seems to be that ide-cs doesn't load on boot whereas it does load when already running the system. There doesn't seem to be any way to add it via the so-called limited shell (limited is certainly an appropriate term though useless might be better). I've also tried using bootfrom=/dev/hda1/knoppix/k*.iso. However, looking at the boot messages with knoppix26 it seems that the partition table isn't recoginized during booting. I'm not sure what the problem is with that since it's just one volume with ntfs. It's recognized correctly by the RedHat installer. I'm considering creating a 700 MB ext2 partition and trying to boot the cd image from that, but that would be an unfortunate workaround. Have there been any more developments with the problem?

[Jansi]

I saw there were people griping about the Sony Vaio SR-33 and booting from the pcmcia cdrom drive. Try this, it works on mine.
knoppix ide2=0x180,0x386 pci=off

Wow, your little trick worked where nothing else was... where did you get that "pci=off" part?

Background: I have a vaio, and had tried "knoppix ide2=0x180 nopcmcia" like the cheatcode said, and it didn't work (usual "dropping you in to a limited shell" biz). I'm mystified how you knew to try the "pci=off" part. Is that listed somewhere? If not, it should be!

Thanks much!

[edgarh]

I want to complain too !!!

Portege 2000 ... Not working !! :S

[Rubane]

I've got a Portege 3480 and finally got everything working with knoppix, I used the poor mans install from a ntfs windows xp partition. I lost the link but if you google poor man's knoppix I'm sure you'll come up with it. Basically what you do is copy the iso to a directory in xp, install grub and modify the boot.ini file to boot into knoppix. Not very hard to setup and it works great!

[w@ter]

Try this, it works on mine.
knoppix ide2=0x180,0x386 pci=off

THANX man !!! i have been trying passively for months to make knoppix run on my Compaq Pressario R3000. but with no effect. i have tryied failsafe and it boot up. so i can install knoppix on my laptop. but when shutting down or just restarting the system - there was some problems. but now !!!! it's working !!! THX