Booting with a PCMCIA CDROM

[TheIowan]

I have a PCMCIA CD/RW drive on one of these lightweight laptops. There is no floppy drive.

It boots the kernel just fine, but it cannot mount the CDROM. I think I need the ide_cs kernel module, but it does not seem to exist anywhere I can get at it. And since there is no floppy drive, I cannot load it that way.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what I can do to boot where it can mount the PCMCIA CD/RW drive?

Thanks!

You might try using ide2=0x180,0x386 as the first boot parameter. This worked for my Sony VAIO laptop.

I found this here: http://www.mobilix.org/Mobile-Guide....ia-device.html

[TheIowan]

Thanks so much for the suggestion. It still doesn't work, though, unfortunately.

Oddly enough, Mandrake 9 will find the CDROM after loading the ide-cs module (and supporting modules). I rebuilt the initrd filesystem and added those modules (pcmcia_core, yenta_socket, ds, ide-cs), but it still doesn't work. I suppose I could spend a lot of time figuring out how Mandrake is booting, and then re-build the Knoppix kernel and boot method, but it's a bit beyond me and I am out of time and am giving up on this for now.

[luelljoc]

Hi,

I had the same problem booting from a PCMCIA cdrom.
So I modified the Knoppix bootdisk.
It works for me so it might also work for you.
Give it a try.
The floppy images can be downloaded from:

http://www.luell.com/download/knoppi...ootdisk.img.gz
http://www.luell.com/download/knoppi...modules.img.gz

Hope that helps.

Bye
Jochen