Introduction

This Howto instructs you how to boot your root filesystem on a PCMCIA Flash Card (or a Compact Flash Card in a PCMCIA Adapter) after you've installed/copied Ubuntu onto the Flash Card.

Taken from [http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=1231044 here] !

Edgy

1. replace /etc/mkinitramfs with /etc/initramfs-tools in the howto for Dapper

2. replace in the modules file ide_cs with pata_pcmcia

Dapper

1. Open a Terminal/Shell

2. Get superuser sudo -i

3. Copy your initramfs cp /etc/mkinitramfs /etc/mkinitramfs-pcmcia (if it is not there install it!)

4. Create a script to build a new initrd.img nano /etc/mkinitramfs-pcmcia/buildme.sh

5. Paste this to your script :

VERSION=`uname --kernel-release`
NAME=pcmcia

set -xv
mkinitramfs -d /etc/mkinitramfs-$NAME -o /boot/initrd.img-$VERSION-$NAME

1. Edit the initramfs.conf file and make sure it says "MODULES=most" in there somewhere nano /etc/mkinitramfs-pcmcia/initramfs.conf

2. Create or append to /etc/mkinitramfs-pcmcia/modules :

# This is to allow beeping early during boot
pcspkr

# This is to allow booting from PCMCIA-CF cards
pcmcia
pcmcia_core
ide_cs
yenta_socket
rsrc_nonstatic

1. run the script /etc/mkinitramfs-pcmcia/buildme.sh

2. The generated initrd.img file is placed in /boot and you can then use it. Configure your boot loader to run it, and then your PCMCIA-CF card should show up as /dev/hda or /dev/sda. It does work.
3. Set your BIOS to boot from PCMCIA before HDD

NOTE : On my system (Toshiba Portege M200) this works nicely if i do NOT set the BIOS to boot from the PCMCIA Adapter e.g. put the kernel and initrd.img on the hdd and just mount the PCMCIA Adapter as root!!! Info on how to do this can be found at ["BootFromUSB"] .