Re: Linux on more than one PC104 won't boot

Hello,

I have a port of Debian Sarge running from compact flash on a PC104
board. Everything is great. But now my boss wants to support another
PC104 board that maps the compact flash to a different ide interface.
So first board the CF is on IDE0,1(/dev/hdb), the second board is
mapped to IDE1,0 (/dev/hdc).

That is no big problem, because you can append a /root/ directive to the
kernel, where to find the root filesystem. In my case this is root=/dev/hda2
(which works because lilo maps these old names, too).

How can I use the same distribution (same CF card) on both boards
without editing the boot=/dev/hdb1 and fstab entry's. There must be a
way to detect what drive is the first in the system (hdb or hdc) and
tell grub or fstab to use that instead.

If you can tell grub per board (instead of per compact flash card), it would
be easy. Otherwise you could try to boot from both devices - if booting from
hdb fails, try booting from hdc. Another idea might be to create two boot
menu entries for which root partition to use.

Otherwise my idea would be to create an initrd (or initramfs), which detects
the device after booting (trying to mount) and then switch the root device
over and continues booting.

If I could solve the fstab problem at least I could edit the boot
parameter in grub and be able to boot the CF card on a different PC
without first modifying the card.

I use devfs for my experiments with linux (but i486 architecture). Then I
get a /dev/root device as my root filesystem. This I simply add to the
/etc/fstab and everything is done; I don't need any direct reference to
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part2 (in my case). LILO finds itself in
the mbr...


.

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