[Peeweelinux] Continued boot problems - Compactflash Corruption?

[Leif Steinhour]

My 2�, starting backwards:

	For starters, running Red Hat 7.2, I had a lot of trouble getting 
things to build properly, but once I got the right system libraries 
installed I was able to get things working. I should add that I had a lot 
of partial builds that looked right but weren't. I don't know whether that 
translates to slackware, but for long term development my advice is to get 
a small hard drive or extra partition set up on your host and put Red Hat 
6.2 (what Adi used to develop Pee Wee) on it: telling Lilo about the extra 
image should be no big deal. You probably already know this, but you can 
download an image from Red Hat if you can't find a disk on ebay.
	The other thing that I should add is that I think you should use 
one of the 2.4 kernels: there have been a lot of posts in the archive 
about how to do that, I'll refer you to those. I say that because I 
suspect that more of the peculularities of the new architecture you're 
interested in may mapped out. You might consider setting up a small 
partition on your host disk as the target and trying to boot that and get 
that booting before you move on to the Transmeta.
	As far as the CRC errors go, I can tell you that I've had pretty 
good luck with a PCMCIA writer, but that it took me a long time to get it 
working properly. I don't have any experience with the IDE readers, so 
won't comment on them, but was wondering if you were able to read and 
write files properly outside of pee wee to them? By which I mean: putting 
a filesystem on a flash disk, mounting the drive on your host, copying 
something and typing "ls -l" to see how big it is. My understanding of dd 
is that because it copies everything all of the filesystem placeholders 
are copied as well, so it's not an accurate picture of the size of a 
partition (supposedly you can defrag a disk and that will change it's size 
for this reason).
	My bet is that things are getting copied fine and that there's 
something funky about what pee wee is doing. I would do that filesystem 
test first and then go to work on your system libraries.

On 2002.10.21 11:06 John Murphy wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Peeweelinux mailing list
> Peeweelinux@adis.on.ca
> http://mail.adis.on.ca/lists/listinfo/peeweelinux
>