[Peeweelinux] Continued boot problems - Compactflash Corruption?

[John Murphy]

I'm still having problems getting peewee to boot.  Let me 
describe my host and targets and see if anyone can offer
some advice.  I've tried loading my own project and
the wireless-isa without luck.

Host system: 586 w/ 128 MB, Running slackware 8.0,
       PNY and Jumpshot compact flash reader/writers.
       Running kernel 2.4.19

(Note that I'm not building any source yet).

Target #1: Transmeta 800Mhz, 256 MB, compact flash IDE adapter

Target #2: ZF Micro 386, 8MB, Compact flash built in.  Has booted
     linux many months ago.  (home made distribution).


I've tried using both of the writers, a number of different
flash cards, etc, to no avail.  Typically, the board
loads the ramdisk, uncompresses linux, and then fails with
a CRC error.

I switched to using a dosFS and syslinux on the flash cards, with
the same result.  I did an MD5sum on the kernel from the extracted
filesystem under peewee, and and md5sum on the mounted 
compactflash filesystem, and they differed.  (Should they?  I didn't
know if a ramdisk word was set in there or something?) - Seeing the
difference, I suspected that something about my system writing the
kernel was not working quite right.  I copied the kernel from the
extracted peewee filesystem to the mounted compact flash card, and
things seemed to improve a bit.  This time, the
system uncompressed the ramdisk, uncompressed the kernel,
and got to "Booting the Kernel" at which point the 
keyboard lights were blinking on and off...

I get the same results using either my load or the wireless-isa
example.

I've tried swapping RAM on both of the targets.  No dice.

Peewee looks great, and I'm sure things will work if I can
get over this hump.  I suspect that parts of my compact flash
image are corrupted during writing.  Any ideas on checks I can do?
Can I push the system into a file and then do a md5sum comparison on
that file and the output of a dd of the compactflash card?

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.  I'm thinking I'm going to
try building a new host system, and was wondering what distribution
you folks would recommend for doing a lot of peewee work; I'm partial
to slackware, but I'll try anythig at this point.

Thanks,
murph