Problems booting Xubuntu with PCMCIA Microdrive

Well it should be possible to create a bootable 100Mb space to install a GRand Unified Boot-loader (grub) to that would then be able to look for other OSs the system normally uses.

A few questions

1. What does your bios allow you to boot from and are any of these a viable option for sticking a 100Mb partition on? If this does only leave the cd then we could probably setup a cd that you only need when you switch the machine on but could then be taken out so the cd-drive could be used usefully. A floppy drive has often been used for this type of thing too so a Cd should be possible. So please list the options you are allowed in the bios' boot-order.

2. How about using a usb-stick?

Err, that's it for now
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

First and foremost, thank you for being so prompt. I have found surprisingly little info on this, and it's been a little discouraging.
I believe I have a broken IDE controller, so I'm running the laptop off a Live-CD right now. The bios supports booting from the Floppy, CD, HDD, and Cardbus NIC. This is what lead me to believe that i'd be able to do this - only the bios doesn't read the microdrive.
I also have had problems running my entire system off flash based memory before. I know people say the limitations of flash aren't really that bad, but i had a 4gb SD card crap out in a week from me using it as the primary drive.
But I digress.
What you describe is exactly what i was hoping i could do - create a boot cd that would point the computer in the right direction and only be needed on startup. I do already have a Boot CD for USB booting, so would it be somehow simpler to boot from the cd, point that to a grub on a USB that would then point to the Microdrive? Or is that just asinine?
Thanks

Lol, where i live we would call that "Going all around Will's mother's [home]". It hints at being the easiest thing to do but i suspect it might be very tricky. It might be much easier to find out what grub is likely to call the Microdrive.

Errr, what is the "Cardbus NIC"? Hopefully you have already installed Ubuntu on the Microdrive and allowed it to do the standard "write grub to MBR" and then changed the bios setting so that Cardbus NIC is at the top, above CD even?

Anyway we clearly need to have a look at what grub can tell us about what it can see these days before we start messing everything up for it. So, on a command-line type

sudo grub

find /boot/grub/stage1

and copy&paste the results into here. Hopefully it will say something like "(hd2,0)" or something simple like that. Err then type

quit

To get back to a normal command-line and close the Grub's one :)
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Another route might be to do as you say - install Ubuntu's main root / onto a usb-stick but put all the /home partition on your flash so that when the Usb-stick fails you can just reformat the usb-stick and re-install without losing your data and setting. I've not heard of Usb stick being that vulnerable before but it's easy to be the 1 person in the world this happens to. A quick skim read here, just to pour salt in the wound
http://blog.ofset.org/ckhung/index.php?post/098a

It might also be smart to put the system logs and other frequent read/write stuff onto separate partitions but i think that would probably be going a bit far.

Did you try reformatting the usb-stick that failed? Is it still around somewhere easy to reach? Aaargh another thing i missed in my last post was asking you for the output of

free -m

By the way are you using a LiveCd of Ubuntu? If so, have you managed to sort out a persistent image for it? If so there's a question in here somewhere that could really do with your help. I think it's also filed in grub so if you click on the file-system type link at the top of the launchpad page here and resort to most recent at top then you should be able to find it easily.
Thanks and regards from
Tom :)

Have you found a solution? I have a similar situation, but I want to boot GRUB off the CF card in the PCMCIA slot and then continue booting from an external USB HDD. I'm not finding a lot of useful info out on the web.

Regards,
Ed

Hi :)

Have you been able to try the new Ubuntu 10.04 before it gets officially released?
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/testing/lucid/beta2
Trying it as a LiveCd or as an extra dual/multi-boot would be ideal. Developers and everyone are keen to try to iron out any problems before 10.04 gets officially released so you might find faster & more effective answers to your bug reports which would make 10.04 work better on your system for you.

If you are still having the same problem then it might be worth exploring installing Ubuntu onto a Usb stick so that you can use it as a LiveUsb session. Then the same Usb stick might also have room to contain the persistent image. I believe there are projects in Africa giving children access to their own usb stick to reduce the amount of tech.support required while allowing multi-user machines to be set-up cheaply. There have been several advances with Ubuntu too within the last year or so to make this sort of thing easier.

Thanks and regards from
Tom :)