Booting off CF Card

[cKBoy]

Is it possible to boot off CF with a diskless Fit-PC?

[RKz]

If you mean the miniSD card, no, but a regular Compact Flash can be used with a special adapter that makes it look like a 2.5" HD.

[advid]

I tried to use a sandisk Compact Flash 4GB with a SATA adaptor as a small SSD.
When I go F2 to BIOS settings a can see the Compact 4GB as a primary drive.
I managed to install the Mageia 1 Linux from the Live CD to the CF, which is seen as /dev/sda.
No problem here.
Grub setup on disk MBR, /dev/sda is my choice.

I check again the BIOS: the drive, the only one, is set as boot device.

Then, I boot the FitPC2i and it can't find any OS. "no operating system found"
It just don't boot the CF !

I tried to chain boot the CF with Grub on my bootable USB key: Grub doesn't see any disk, except the key itself.

Any idea please ?

[advid]

Self-reply :

I've found a page which claims that even if my CF-SATA adapter is bootable, not all CF are bootable ...
(and the compatible ones advertised are very expensive)

I think I'll go back trying to boot of SD...

[gabrielh]

Hello

We didn't test such adapters, so there may be a problem with an adapter. Before you are going to buy a bunch of different cards, please try them first

[advid]

The SSD price have droped a lot, I've just bought 64GB SATA SSD to get rid of usb keys and have higher speed.

64GB is too much, I needed 8GB at most, but it's only 37€ so...


This time there won't be any problem to boot I hope

The CF Card and its adapter were just wasted money