Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

playdayz · Joined: 25 Apr 2008 Posts: 3705

Is anyone interested in how Puppy determines that it is booting from a CF (flash card) in an IDE adaptor? I am interested because that is what I have, a Sandisk Extreme IV 4GB in an Addonics CF to IDE adaptor. Everything works great except that Puppy doesn’t seem to be able to distinguish this CF/IDE (ideflash) arrangement from a physical hard disk (idehd) no matter what I do. At least I don’t think it does. The reason I am interested is that I understand that Puppy will minimize writes to a flash disk but not to a physical hard disk.

The funny thing about this, is that the Addonics CF to IDE plus the Sandisk is supposed to look and behave exactly like a physical hard disk—and it does. I’ve installed XP-SP2 and Mandriva 2008 and both installed and ran with no problems, just as with a physical disk. Puppy does too, except for the writes (which may even be a bogus issue with an advanced card like the Sandisk IV???).

I installed Puppy 3.01 with the CF card in IDE adaptor option from the Universal Installer. It installed and ran perfectly (it installed as with a CD with extlinux, etc, instead of Grub). In /etc/rc.d/PUPSTATE the PUPMODE=12 and the pmedia=ideflash. I was told in a question in the Newbie Forum that with a CF card in an IDE adaptor the PUPMODE should be 13, and that makes sense from looking at the documentation (the +1 comes from mounting a third layer and not writing pup_sav.2fs directly to the disk in real time). This seems like a separate, more advanced problem so I am introducing it here (I have tried to avoid any typos Wink

I can also install with the Hard Disk option. That installs with Grub in the MBR and the PUPMODE=12 and pmedia=idehd. From the two installs, it looks like maybe pmedia is set at install time—but that PUPMODE is determined while booting???

Elsewhere in the docs I have seen that pfix=nodma is recommended for CF cards in IDE (and also for usbflash). Maybe that is a clue because the Sandisk IV is a “udma” card and works about as fast as a udma 4 drive. This is not the most important problem in the forums I know, but these little things help to learn the guts of the OS. Thanks.

HairyWill · Joined: 26 May 2006 Posts: 2949 Location: Southampton, UK

I think I have isolated the problem code in init

playdayz · Joined: 25 Apr 2008 Posts: 3705

Yes, that's it. It works.

There was a 0 in cat /sys/block/hda/removable

I followed pizzasgood's instructions to edit the initrd.gz.

I used this patch because I thought it was less easy for me to misunderstand.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=13430

HairyWill · Joined: 26 May 2006 Posts: 2949 Location: Southampton, UK

Excellent.
That will work for you but not as a generic solution as it hardcodes PUPMODE=13
For future puppy releases I recommend the following as a patch the line at the bottom checks the state of the PMEDIA boot parm

mcewanw · Joined: 16 Aug 2007 Posts: 1528 Location: New Zealand

I haven't tried modifying initrd.gz as yet, but have simply tried putting PMEDIA=ideflash on my menu.lst kernel line.
Unfortunately, it won't then boot: says it can't find the pup_400.sfs file
If I use PMEDIA=usbflash it boots fine.
You can find my full menu.lst contents here:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=29580

mcewanw · Joined: 16 Aug 2007 Posts: 1528 Location: New Zealand

magerlab · Joined: 08 Jul 2007 Posts: 730

is there a way to change init to force looking for puppyfiles or modem if we know that all the files are on eee's ssd and there's no modem present
or no version upgrade?

thank you