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On Oct 29, 2005, at 10:52 pm, A. Khattri wrote: |
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> On Sun, 30 Oct 2005, Richard Watson wrote: |
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> |
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>> Hi - I have an old Sony Vaio I thought to run Gentoo on with X. The CD |
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>> drive is attached to a PCMCIA card. When the LiveCD boots it seems to |
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>> go |
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>> OK up until mounting root at which point I get the error "The Root |
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>> Block |
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>> Device is unspecified or not detected " and then I'm offerred to |
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>> either |
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>> shell or specify a /dev. I've tried gentoo-nofb dopcmcia ide=nodma but |
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>> no luck. I'm a bit stuck at this point does anyone have any |
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>> suggestions |
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>> how I could make the install CD boot? Thanks, Richard |
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> |
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> What sort of PCMCIA card? SCSI? |
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I have this idea it's not SCSI. |
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Sony sold this CD-ROM-on-a-string for their sub-notebook Viaos of the |
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PII - PIII era. I think the PMCIA card & optical driver were both |
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hardwired to the cable and it was certainly never implied that the |
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PCMCIA card might be used with any other kind of drive. Google finds a |
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photo at http://www.allnotebooks.ru/img/compl/51.gif |
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I installed Gentoo on a Pentium II 400 Vaio "Picturebook", the Sony |
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with a 6" widescreen (1024 x 480??) but never had one of these CD-Roms |
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available, only the floppy drive. In fact I cheated & resorted to |
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removing the hard-drive & installing Gentoo on it using a desktop PC |
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before returning the drive to the laptop. I think it might be possible |
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to avoid this by installing from stage 3 - that mostly just needs to be |
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unpacked onto a Linux-formatted partition, doesn't it? There are surely |
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Linux distros that'll boot on this device so a pre-compiled kernel |
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could be copied across from another machine and then only grub needs to |
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be run, I think. |
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Richard: does Knoppix boot from this CD-Rom drive? An Ubuntu LiveCD? |
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Perhaps it might be worth trying an older (2003, 2004) Gentoo install |
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CD. A Google for "parallel port cd-rom linux" returns, amongst others, |
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this page http://cyberelk.net/tim/parport/paride.html so I reckon your |
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drive is probably supported by the kernel. |
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Stroller. |
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-- |
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