[sclug] CF IDE Booting

[Peter Brewer]

We bought several CF IDE adapters 
(http://linitx.com/product_info.php?cPath=39&products_id=448) hoping to 
use them to boot our servers - unfortunately we are having some problems.

What we are trying to build is a system with the CF containing "/boot" 
and a collection of SATA HD's in a series of RAID5's containing 
everything else.  The reason being that you can't boot from RAID5 (as 
far as I understand?) and we wanted an easily changeable 'disk' to hold 
the boot info.

We have tried installing Ubuntu, Debian and Suse and none of them manage 
to setup /boot on the CF successfully.  Ubuntu and Debian both report 
the following error when the partitioner tries to write to the CF:

"Input/Output error during read on..."

Suse on the other hand gets all the way through phase 1 of the installer 
but when it reboots for phase 2 GRUB throws an error.

I should add when added to a functioning system I can successfully mount 
and access the CF device as a read/write disk.

Any ideas what is going wrong?

Many thanks

Peter Brewer