On Sun, 2005-10-30 at 02:36 +0000, Stroller wrote: > On Oct 29, 2005, at 10:52 pm, A. Khattri wrote: > > On Sun, 30 Oct 2005, Richard Watson wrote: > > > >> Hi - I have an old Sony Vaio I thought to run Gentoo on with X. The CD > >> drive is attached to a PCMCIA card. When the LiveCD boots it seems to > >> go > >> OK up until mounting root at which point I get the error "The Root > >> Block > >> Device is unspecified or not detected " and then I'm offerred to > >> either > >> shell or specify a /dev. I've tried gentoo-nofb dopcmcia ide=nodma but > >> no luck. I'm a bit stuck at this point does anyone have any > >> suggestions > >> how I could make the install CD boot? Thanks, Richard > > > > What sort of PCMCIA card? SCSI? > > I have this idea it's not SCSI. > > Sony sold this CD-ROM-on-a-string for their sub-notebook Viaos of the > PII - PIII era. I think the PMCIA card & optical driver were both > hardwired to the cable and it was certainly never implied that the > PCMCIA card might be used with any other kind of drive. Google finds a > photo at http://www.allnotebooks.ru/img/compl/51.gif > > I installed Gentoo on a Pentium II 400 Vaio "Picturebook", the Sony > with a 6" widescreen (1024 x 480??) but never had one of these CD-Roms > available, only the floppy drive. In fact I cheated & resorted to > removing the hard-drive & installing Gentoo on it using a desktop PC > before returning the drive to the laptop. I think it might be possible > to avoid this by installing from stage 3 - that mostly just needs to be > unpacked onto a Linux-formatted partition, doesn't it? There are surely > Linux distros that'll boot on this device so a pre-compiled kernel > could be copied across from another machine and then only grub needs to > be run, I think. > > Richard: does Knoppix boot from this CD-Rom drive? An Ubuntu LiveCD? > Perhaps it might be worth trying an older (2003, 2004) Gentoo install > CD. A Google for "parallel port cd-rom linux" returns, amongst others, > this page http://cyberelk.net/tim/parport/paride.html so I reckon your > drive is probably supported by the kernel. > > Stroller. > Hey Stroller ... You got the model in 1 ...! I think you're correct. I'm going to try and use partition magic under Windows 2000 which is the OS it came with to create my partitions and install a stage 3. I'll let you know how I go. Hopefully having an EXT2 partition will help Knoppix start properly. Thanks, Richard
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