cf card as hard drive

[Megafag]

I started tinkering with the bios..I was able to get the machine to boot from the bios selection "FDD" I placed the cf card in a 24 in 1 card reader and plugged it into a usb port. I am using it now.. boots slow to be expected, but works just fine.
thanks for the help.

I would say the slow boot has something to do with fat32 though

i seriously suggest you use ext3/4

[sgosnell]

He said he formatted it to FAT32 to prepare for the install, not that he kept it that way during and after the install. I think the filesystem format is a red herring. It's almost certainly a problem with the BIOS in the laptop, since other machines boot easily from the CF, and he now can boot from it on the original machine using a USB card reader. It's naturally going to boot slower that way.

[newbemac]

I am not storing any data on this machine, it was more of an experiment than anything else. I use google docs for long term storage for multi machine convienience. The laptop is very old and when this little experiment dies I'll toss the machine or experiment with it in some other way. But In the meantime I can get a little more life out of it.

[adam814]

You might have more luck booting the machine as an LTSP client. These can be diskless provided either your BIOS supports network boot or you use a PXE boot CD of some sort.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Ub...SPQuickInstall

[ceratophyllum]

I tried this on an old Mac powerbook Lombard and Pismo and the results were bad: for some strange reason, under Debian Linux, the filesystem would always get corrupted after a while and the machine would stop booting. (Ubuntu PPC would not even boot, so I tried Debian. No idea why, it just did not see any hard drive.)

So then I tried putting Panther on the both laptops. I found it to run painfully slow on both machines. Replacing the CF card with a 100GB hard disk made both machines work perfectly and much more quickly. When I was using CF there was no significant improvement in battery life.