[Soekris] Question about Debian Linux on Soekris boards

[Robin Kipp]

Hi Eric,
Ah OK, well I returned the board anyway, so... But one question, how
could you partition the CF card like this if you use an installer like
the Debian installer that has a guided partitioning utility? Since this
will overwrite the partition table and reformat the CF card anyway...
Robin

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eric Lammerts [mailto:soekris-tech at lists.lammerts.org] 
> Sent: Saturday, September 27, 2008 9:20 PM
> To: Robin Kipp
> Cc: soekris-tech at lists.soekris.com
> Subject: Re: [Soekris] Question about Debian Linux on Soekris boards
> 
> 
> On 09/25/2008 12:35 PM, Robin Kipp wrote:
> > Well, this won't be my first embedded PC actually, I 
> purchased an Alix 
> > 2c2 from PCEngines a few months ago and tried to install 
> Debian on the 
> > Compact Flash card using the computer, however I couldn't boot the 
> > device.
> 
> I'm using the Alix boards (2c0, 3c1, 3c2), and I am very 
> happy with them.
> 
> The only problem I have is that it seems the LBA support in 
> the bios is 
> broken. This can lead to boot problems if your CF card is bigger than 
> 512Mb. You can work around this problem by partitioning your CF cards 
> with the same C/H/S values the Alix BIOS is using.
> 
> example:
> if the Alix board prints this on boot:
> 
> 01F0 Master 848A SanDisk SDCFH-1024
> Phys C/H/S 1986/16/63 Log C/H/S 993/32/63
> 
> you should partition the card with sfdisk -C 993 -H 32 -S 63. 
> (cfdisk -c 993 -h 32 -s 63 should work too, but I haven't 
> tested that).
> 
> Eric
>