Hardware

Hi all,

I'm new to the forum (and to m0n0wall)...

I'm trying to use m0n0 v1.231 on an oldish HP PC; my problem is that when the PC tries to boot from the CF where I've written m0n0, it says "Operating system not found".

The PC is an old HP Brio, Celeron 400 with 128 MB of RAM, BIOS timestamp 1998; considering that the PC itself works fine, it usually runs Smoothwall (Linux-based firewall distro) from hard disk, I assumed the problem to be related with the compactflash adapter or medium.

The BIOS of the PC allows me to boot from floppy, HD or CD-ROM; all of those options have been tested in the past, and found working.

I've tried with many different CF's, ranging in size from 16 MB to 128 MB; when I boot with a CF as the primary IDE drive, the BIOS properly recognise the CF size, so I think the IDE-CF adapter is definitely working.

I've tried writing the m0n0 CF image from Linux and Windows, but still the resulting CF's aren't recognised as good for booting by the firewall PC.

I'm left wondering what can be causing the problem... Any suggestions?

thanks in advance for any hints.

Further to my previous post, I'm thinking about the CF image (BSD) disk geometry...

In fact the BIOS of the PC auto-recognises the CF (thru the CF-IDE adapter) as having a certain number of "virtual" cylinders/heads/sectors, amounting to the total capacity of the CF (say 16 MB).

I'm now wondering if I should instead force a different number of cylinders/heads/sectors to match the *real* capacity of the BSD image (amounting to 7.3 MB circa), so that a bootable BSD partition can be found.

I'd be curious to learn if anybody here is using an IDE-CF adapter on a standard PC, and in case what BIOS parameters are they using.

thanks again.

I'm no expert at this, but I had the same problem when I first began using my CF disk. Here are my notes on the subject:

In the bios, select the IDE interface where the CF is located.
Set IDE Secondary Master - Manual, Access Mode: CHS (Cylinder head sector) rather than LBA (logical block addressing) which most hard disks use.
Let it auto fill in the specs of the CF card
Save and exit.

Note: Some CF cards (SanDisk) support LBA but require PIO manually set to mode 1, (not auto-detecting PIO mode 4.)

Thanks for the hints.

I'm now playing with the CHS/PIO/DMA values in the BIOS, but up to now to no avail.

If anything, it's reassuring to hear that you had similar problems in the beginning but eventually managed to boot from the CF :-)

I'll let you know if I succeed.

thanks again

ntt,

I recently had my monowall PC turned off, and since the battery was dead, my bios reset to defaults, and then it wouldn't boot. I got it going, but my old notes didn't help. Turns out that what I posted in the message above was the OLD info (that worked once, but not a few weeks ago).

To make things work recently I ended up using the bios's IDE disk detection selection. The disks were scanned, and I was given two options. One was labeled "LBA" and I selected it. Things worked! So now the bios lists my "hard disk" (CF) as type "LBA" with other params that were inserted automatically.

Maybe that will help. Sorry the first post didn't help. It didn't help me either, even though it worked once...

Hi Lee,

thanks for the update.

in the meantime I've tried any combination of BIOS parms, including LBA, CHS and DMA/PIO... but any of them did work unfortunately.

I'm still trying, and let you know.

thanks,

Corrado

OK, I give up.

For the record, I think the BIOS of my PC plainly refuses to boot from CF's.

In fact, the PC correctly senses the compact flash size and parameters (CHS), but still seems to consider it a "removable medium", and doesn't allow it to be used as a hard disk (to boot from).

I still have a tiny doubt that my IDE -> CF adapter may be the culprit here, but I only have this one and hence cannot do any further testing.

For the time being I'm falling back to the cdrom+floppy m0n0wall configuration; then I will test that IDE-CF adapter on some other PC's, and see if I can find another oldish PC allowing it to be used as a boot medium.

Thanks for your support, Lee.

Corrado

Hi again,

I've eventually found the answer to the problem: I was using (too) old compact flash media!

In fact I still had around many small CF's from about 2000-2001, and being them of the smallest capacity (16-64 MB), by today's standards, I assumed they were more than enough for the task.

Well, it turned out they were TOO old! Something in their standard seems to be in fact off-standard today, at least from the point of view of my IDE-CF adapter, and the PC couldn't find a bootable device.

As soon as I've tried using a "modern" 256 MB Compact Flash, everything worked fine.

So, BEWARE OF OLD CF's you may still have around!!!

cheers.