[Peeweelinux] Help request booting IBM Netvista thin client

[Barry Gershenfeld]

Michael,

I don't have any experience with you hardware but if it says it
can boot off IDE0 then you ought to be able to get *something*
out of it.

Look at the text of the OS boot failure message carefully.
Also compare to what you see if you pull the CF card out
and try to boot.  Most non-bootable media still has a 
boot program in it that says in effect "Can't boot this".

Is there a BIOS message that shows it detects the flash disk?

Next, dd the first sector of your CF card back off the
card and look at it, and see if it looks like a boot sector.
Or post a hex dump of it if you don't have that experience.

Make sure the IBM really boots that drive as IDE0 and that
you told peeweelinux that it is "hda".  A lot of boards
that have a CF drive use hdc (master drive but second
controller.)  Make sure peewee didn't throw an error,
especially in the lilo installation.

A floppy's boot sector, and a hard drive's boot + partition
table aren't the same.  I don't think the floppy sector
will boot a hard drive but I don't recall trying (now
I'll have to...)

A linux kernel will boot from a floppy if you dd it.  But
again I don't think this would work on a hard drive.

The point I'm trying to make is to find out what happens
in that first access to IDE0.  If that doesn't happen,
then it matters little how your Linux was built.

Barry