Experiences on Etherboot for IDE Compact flash and FLASHROMS

[Joey Nelson]

ron minnich wrote
> To get your payload on CF: 
> First, you MUST fdisk the CF. Make the whole thing a DOS partition, 
> doesn't matter. I have found the hard way that for some 
> reason etherboot 
> will not work right unless the CF has a partition table on 
> it. I have not 
> followed the whole thing through and I assume it is a need 
> for C/H/S info 
> that is not there without a partition table or some such. 
> 
> Then mkelfImage on the kernel of choice.
> 
> Then dd if=elfImage_of_kernel of=/dev/hdc bs=4096 skip=1

Alternately using sfdisk you can set the first partition to start at
sector 1.  I configure my CF with a sandisk compact flash usb adapter at
/dev/sda.

sfdisk -uS /dev/sda

The '-uS' is to use sectors as the standard unit.  sfdisk is not as
friendly as the standard fdisk, but the standard fdisk doesn't allow the
first partition to start at sector 1 on my system.  Just make sure the
first partition is large enough to hold your elf kernel image.  You can
do what ever you want with the remaining space.

Then when you want to write the kernel out to the flash

dd if=kernel.elf of=/dev/sda1 bs=4096

This has been working great for me.  I have my rootfs as a read only
ext2 fs on the second partition.  

Joey