Using a PCMCIA ATA Drive as system drive

[dany_n]

I've been trying around for hours without success.

On a Dell Laptop, I'm using a Datapak 2GB PCMCIA ATA card.

I can boot from Gentoo CD and perform an installation on this drive (ide_cs). The drive is well recognized as /hde.

At the end I can't write the GRUB and co. as the drive no longer recognized !

I've read some information on PCMCIA and Linux and I understand there is NO WAY to boot directly from a PCMCIA device (at least with my Dell). So I need to use a floppy to boot the system using Initrd to load the PCMCIA support.

I've used PCINITRD command which creates an INITRD image with the necessary drivers/modules (i82365, ide_cs). When the floppy boots, Initrd is started but the drive doesn't appear and boot process stops because /hde not found !

I tried to activate Cardbus , i82365 and PCMCIA IDE support on the kernel without success (using the kernel of another Gentoo box... remember I can't boot anymore to my fresh install !!!).

I'm lost but I pretty sure there is a workaround to this problem.

Should I activate/de-activate Cardbus support (Module, embedded), i82365.... ?

After trying so many combinations of kernel settings I don't know what to do.

Thank you in advance for any comments that would help me to move forward.
Dany

[dany_n]

I forgot to mention that in fact I don't use a floppy to boot the system but a CDROM because the Kernel+Initrd were too big to fit on a single floppy.

It's a Win98 boot CD that allows me to use the latest Loadlin to perform the INITRD and kernel loading.