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Compact Flash Boot- MTD

Hi,

We are working to develop an embedded system. We are using a small motherboard (SBC), 3.5" form factor from Axiom. This motherboard features a compact flash slot on the bottom that acts as an IDE drive.

We are using (and need) a 4GB Sandisk CF card. But, we are having troubles booting various Linux distributions. For example. Fedora Core

4 will get to the hardware detection, and freeze at hda detection with a message 'cache flushes not supported'. This same thing happens with Redhat 7.1, Debian, and SUSE.

If I try one of the live CD's like DSL or Knoppix, it detects hda compact flash and boots just fine. I am even able to write to it.

I am wondering if any of you out there know why, or if you can confirm my suspicion that certain MTDs (memory technology devices) modules are not complied into Fedora, for example, but do exsist in the Knoppix or DSL distros. If anyone out there has some advice or experience with MTD and the kernels, I'd appreciate some comments.

Thank you in advance.

Reply to
caryon
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Hello,

try to use another brand, e.g. Toshiba.

I made the experience that some embedded devices to not work with some brands of CF. There were various symptoms. Maybe the error message is just a result of somewhat else.

Greetings Ernst

Reply to
Ernst Murnleitner

I doubt the MTD layer has anything to do with this. CF devices, though they use flash memory internally, behave like ordinary IDE disk drives at the hardware interface and thus the responsible driver in Linux would be the IDE driver.

I have not seen problems like the ones you describe above, so I'm afraid I cannot really help. My guess, however is that the distros that work (i.e. Knoppix/DSL) use a different IDE driver/kernel revision than the ones that do not work.

Why not just use Knoppix? It is Debian-based and it can be installed on a harddisk, AFAIK.

Rob

--
Robert Kaiser                     email: rkaiser AT sysgo DOT com
SYSGO AG                          http://www.elinos.com
Klein-Winternheim / Germany       http://www.sysgo.com
Reply to
Robert Kaiser

Thank you for your posts so far. I have tired other vendors- they do the same thing. Interesting though is the size of the card matters- anything up to 512MB works.

We may have to use Knoppix, but the reason why I wanted to use Fedora was becasue of the camera device we will be attaching via USB- the vendor only developed drivers for Fedora.

Reply to
caryon

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