On Tue, 14 May 2002 17:49:35 -0400, Hussain, Omar [LBRT/LNA] wrote: >WEll it looks like the ide adaptor we bought sees these two cards as being >different. Its really annoying...I guess all compact flash cards aren't >perfectly identical. >so if i we stick to the same brand, we'll be ok i guess.
A CF -> IDE adapter is no more than a just a CF connector to IDE connector conversion with a pin grounded so that the CF boots up in "True IDE" mode. The adapter dosen't "see" anything. It's your IDE bridge that "sees" the device. We use 2 differnet CF's here (Sandisk and SST) and they are both ATA-2 devices. They are almost ATA-3 but DMA is required in ATA-3 and CF's generally only do PIO. Since the device is an IDE device the CHS stuff is really only suggestions to the device. It does translations behind your back. You can set them to be anything you want and the device will work. You just might not get the full capacity of the device. Different mfgs will have different views on what the "optimum" settings are for thier devices so thats why you see different values for different CFs. If you have 2 different devices with different CHS setups and you copy an raw image file then its unlikely it will work. As you have seen. If you use the BIOS to put the devices in LBA mode you may have better success. This is a really gnarly subject. I use syslinux to boot my CF cards because LILO is such a pain in the ass to get setup right because of this. I suggest that instead of trying to make raw copies of your disk you make a .tar copy the filesystem contents and then create a script that: fdisks the device and creates the partitions, makes a file systems on it, mounts the filesystem extracts the .tar file onto the filesystem. makes it bootable the way you want it. The last line is the tricky part. -- Richard A. Smith Bitworks, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] 501.846.5777 x204 Sr. Design Engineer http://www.bitworks.com -- To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the command "unsubscribe linux-embedded" in the message body. For more information, see <http://waste.org/mail/linux-embedded>.
